Dawn of Wonder (The Wakening Book 1)

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It makes subjective opinion-based critiques of creative writing and wild assumptions about characters, theme, and morals based on a small excerpt. Which is why optimizing the first chapter is very important (of course you should optimize your whole book, no question).

The tall rider’s green military coat whipped and snapped around him as he leaned forward in the stirrups, head close to the horse’s plunging neck. I want to just copy and paste the whole section because I really like how Renshaw describes Aedan’s feelings, but I won’t. Dawn of Wonder is a winner of these awards: the 2015 LYRA Awards for Sci-Fi/Fantasy, 2015 CIPA EVVY awards for Fiction/Fantasy and the 2015 Beverly Hills Book Awards for Fantasy. Then General Osric shows up with his three friends and Captain Senbert is more than happy to put Osric in charge of everything. It might be possible to pull it off if the narrator got into her head and explained the mood shifts, but Renshaw doesn’t do this.

I can appreciate the critique of the writing even though I loved reading this out loud to my kids… just great memories. It does seem to be some kind of beast that Prince and other dude don’t want the people to know about. Like, things happen (like Peashot’s peashooter is taken away from him for a while), but this book is long and it doesn’t seem all that particularly important. It is a testament to the combined skill of Renshaw’s writing and Reynold narration that the novel’s almost thirty hour runtime does not feel nearly that long; despite the novel dragging a bit during the middle section. The higher-ups tell Aedan and company to not tell anyone about the giant animal they saw so that people won’t panic.

An entire scene, for example, was used to combine teaching Aeden to not underestimate the quiet or insecure people and people with disabilities with learning to make a temporary-bow in the forest. Surely if he does “change his mind” and come back, if he doesn’t see you surely he’d be able to figure out that you’d be with Harriet and Borr?I didn’t think I could dislike a Lessons from Bad Writing protagonist more than that Spell for Chameleon guy (Flatch?