The Davies family were perfectly normal, in the eyes of another. They ate together at the same time, they drank together at the same time and they played together at the same time. The problem was one of their children was not like this.
Hope Davies was a child like no other. Her long golden hair naturally contained varying shades of purple, and her brilliant blue eyes contained flecks of orange so bright they were an inferno amongst water. The other members of her family all had dark hair, and matching, warm, chestnut eyes. Until the age of around seven, she had looked exceptionally ordinary, until her features began to change, sharpen. Every day now people would whisper, point at her and laugh as she began to look worse and worse. Her hair was like a golden crown on her head, but nobody looked at her as though she were a queen.
But the Davies ignored all this, for they did not care what their child looked like, as long as she was beautiful on the inside. They did not even notice when she woke up and said, “It is time for the child to rise.” They simply decided that she had had a strange dream, and went about their day as usual.
Mr Davies worked in London, as part of a car manufacturing company, and on the train journey in, a most curious thing happened. A bird flew past the window of the train on the underground; its flaming red feathers made it look as though it were a moving fire. People pointed and stared, but by the time Mr Davies looked up from his newspaper, it was gone, and all he saw of it was a brief glimpse of a red tail shooting out of sight.
When he arrived at his work, he found a strange white bird sitting in front of the door. Its body was a blinding white light, shining onto every available surface as its majestic beauty cast looks of wonder on all who saw the light. Mr Davies looked at it curiously for several minutes, before the bird flew away towards the sunlight. Shaking his balding head, Mr Davies walked inside the door.
Meanwhile, back home, Mrs Davies was experiencing more oddities, ones she thought were in no way less peculiar than what her husband had seen. A purple bird circled the chimney, diving down it occasionally before flying back up. Another bird, this time blue, flew around the garden like it was a flying arena for the circus. Mrs Davies eventually gave in to her annoyance as what she thought were pests and shooed the blue bird away, before going up to the attic and opening the skylight to prod the other bird with a stick. The three children were at school, and did not see these strange birds, but Mrs Davies was certain they would like to hear about them.
Little did she know that the children already knew what was happening.
Hope wandered around the playground, head down, staring at the ground, when a bird flew down and landed on her shoulder. Its black feathers tickled her neck lightly and she looked over. “Hello,” she cooed. The other children in the playground pointed and stared at her.
“Hey, ugly!” a girl shouted. “What’s that you’ve got there? Oh wait, sorry, my bad, it’s a bit of your face, isn’t it?”
Hope bowed her head and walked away, tears stinging her eyes. More birds flocked down to land on her, until the whole playground was laughing at her struggling to get them off. Tearful, she ran to the toilets to cry, shaking the birds off her as she went. They flew away as she entered the toilet and she breathed a sigh of relief. Wiping her eyes, she went back outside where the other children were still standing, waiting for a chance to annoy her.
As she left at the end of the day, a rainbow bird sat on her head. She tried to wave it off, but her efforts were in vain as it dug its claws deeper into her scalp. The other children laughed and she ran all the way home. The bird hopped off when she reached the doorstep and nestled in a tree, watching the house.
That night, a figure entered her room. It walked over to where she lay, peacefully dreaming, and kissed her forehead. “Sleep well, my princess.”
“No!” the woman screamed. “Not Hope!” But they took her anyway, the men with the swords and the shields, the men with the spears and crossbows. The palace guards were stunned by the invasion, barely any of them able to move: never before had there been a siege, and they were none of them prepared for such a thing. A small baby was smuggled out of the palace, the robes around it being discarded in the kidnappers’ haste to leave.
When they reached the forest a man stood in a clearing, and asked, “Have you got her?” The men nodded. “Good. Now, take her to a mortal orphanage, she should be taken in a week or so. I shall rule supreme and the land of Primaious shall know only our kind for evermore and eternity."
Hope woke up suddenly, heart pounding in her chest. A scream echoed around her room and it took her a while to gather the sense that it was her. Shakily, she stepped out of her bed and crossed to the window. The birds sat in tree, staring right at her. Suddenly, a gust of wind swept up around her and she was carried to the birds.
“You must go,” they said in harmony, “to the place you were intended to call home.” Hope knew what she had to do.
She packed a bag and ran.
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125,007 Literary Works • 672,815 Reviews
Oh, I finally found this again! I was EveningSharks, but I couldn't log on and so I made a new account, which is this, so I shall now proceed to repost my review, I hope you don't mind!
XD 
Well. This is ... Intriguing. This is what I've gathered this is about:
Hope is a young girl who looks radically different from the rest of her family. She has blonde hair with pruple streaks(???) and gorgeous blue and orange eyes while the rest of her family has dark hair and brown eyes.
Her parents witness rather strange incidents involving birds when doing mundane things such as going to work and entering their office.
As a child, Hope is bullied on the playground because she's ugly and is somehow attacked by birds. She runs off to the toilet for safety but the girds follow her.
Anyway, that night she goes to bed and a beautiful woman calls her princess after entering her room and kissing her forehead. Then we get a flashback to a castle where a baby is stolen before we're brought back to the harsh reality.
Hope wakes up and is told by birds to pack her bags and leave immediately.
Now, onto the writing itself.
The main character: Goodness, what's going on with the name and the looks?
For the name, I'm guessing your character lives in Britain and comes from/was adopted by a middle-class family. Why would they have given her such a typically American name? If the story was happening somewhere in the Bible Belt, I would understand, but this is happening is what I'm guessing is England. A more classical name would certainly fit better.
As for her looks, I'm sorry, but there must always be logic, even in fantasy worlds. My main qualm is the fact that Hope has purple streaks in her hair. If her hair was just blonde, it would be fine in my opinion, the purple streaks are just too much. Same with the orange flecks in her eyes. Of course, everybody wants to create something beautiful with their work but we must always think: will the reader like this or will they think it's hard to understand? Will they think it's ridiculous? Will they think the character is too bland and put the book down? What you've described here is an emo girl's first OC. It's not a bad thing, per se, but it's a common mistake which can easily be changed.
All in all, I recommend you change the name (if it was given by the 'normal' family) and keep the blonde-hair-blue-eyes trope, but take away the special colours... You can always add them in later.
The writing: Starting with the character's physical description can be tricky. In this case, it was poorly executed. Giving your reader a block of a description to read with make them want to stop. Try lacing your description in with actions such as 'she ran a hand through her long blonde hair' or 'as she passed in front of the mirror, she came to face her blue eyes'. Other than that, everything looks fine... Except for the dream/flashback scene. You can leave that out and keep it for a later chapter. I honestly think a revelation like that should be kept for later.
Also the bullying scene seem a bit... Off. Children don't usually attack people randomly, just because they're ugly. They're much more vile than that. You might want to keep that in mind!
Grammar, spelling mistakes and Typos: I honestly didn't find any, good job on that! Keep that up!
All in all, I don't think this deserves a five or four star rating from me, BUT it still has some potential.
Goodbye for now!
Well. This is ... Intriguing. This is what I've gathered this is about:
Hope is a young girl who looks radically different from the rest of her family. She has blonde hair with pruple streaks(???) and gorgeous blue and orange eyes while the rest of her family has dark hair and brown eyes.
Her parents witness rather strange incidents involving birds when doing mundane things such as going to work and entering their office.
As a child, Hope is bullied on the playground because she's ugly and is somehow attacked by birds. She runs off to the toilet for safety but the girds follow her.
Anyway, that night she goes to bed and a beautiful woman calls her princess after entering her room and kissing her forehead. Then we get a flashback to a castle where a baby is stolen before we're brought back to the harsh reality.
Hope wakes up and is told by birds to pack her bags and leave immediately.
Now, onto the writing itself.
The main character: Goodness, what's going on with the name and the looks?
For the name, I'm guessing your character lives in Britain and comes from/was adopted by a middle-class family. Why would they have given her such a typically American name? If the story was happening somewhere in the Bible Belt, I would understand, but this is happening is what I'm guessing is England. A more classical name would certainly fit better.
As for her looks, I'm sorry, but there must always be logic, even in fantasy worlds. My main qualm is the fact that Hope has purple streaks in her hair. If her hair was just blonde, it would be fine in my opinion, the purple streaks are just too much. Same with the orange flecks in her eyes. Of course, everybody wants to create something beautiful with their work but we must always think: will the reader like this or will they think it's hard to understand? Will they think it's ridiculous? Will they think the character is too bland and put the book down? What you've described here is an emo girl's first OC. It's not a bad thing, per se, but it's a common mistake which can easily be changed.
All in all, I recommend you change the name (if it was given by the 'normal' family) and keep the blonde-hair-blue-eyes trope, but take away the special colours... You can always add them in later.
The writing: Starting with the character's physical description can be tricky. In this case, it was poorly executed. Giving your reader a block of a description to read with make them want to stop. Try lacing your description in with actions such as 'she ran a hand through her long blonde hair' or 'as she passed in front of the mirror, she came to face her blue eyes'. Other than that, everything looks fine... Except for the dream/flashback scene. You can leave that out and keep it for a later chapter. I honestly think a revelation like that should be kept for later.
Also the bullying scene seem a bit... Off. Children don't usually attack people randomly, just because they're ugly. They're much more vile than that. You might want to keep that in mind!
Grammar, spelling mistakes and Typos: I honestly didn't find any, good job on that! Keep that up!
All in all, I don't think this deserves a five or four star rating from me, BUT it still has some potential.
Goodbye for now!
Well. This is ... Intriguing. This is what I've gathered this is about:
Hope is a young girl who looks radically different from the rest of her family. She has blonde hair with pruple streaks(???) and gorgeous blue and orange eyes while the rest of her family has dark hair and brown eyes.
Her parents witness rather strange incidents involving birds when doing mundane things such as going to work and entering their office.
As a child, Hope is bullied on the playground because she's ugly and is somehow attacked by birds. She runs off to the toilet for safety but the girds follow her.
Anyway, that night she goes to bed and a beautiful woman calls her princess after entering her room and kissing her forehead. Then we get a flashback to a castle where a baby is stolen before we're brought back to the harsh reality.
Hope wakes up and is told by birds to pack her bags and leave immediately.
Now, onto the writing itself.
The main character: Goodness, what's going on with the name and the looks?
For the name, I'm guessing your character lives in Britain and comes from/was adopted by a middle-class family. Why would they have given her such a typically American name? If the story was happening somewhere in the Bible Belt, I would understand, but this is happening is what I'm guessing is England. A more classical name would certainly fit better.
As for her looks, I'm sorry, but there must always be logic, even in fantasy worlds. My main qualm is the fact that Hope has purple streaks in her hair. If her hair was just blonde, it would be fine in my opinion, the purple streaks are just too much. Same with the orange flecks in her eyes. Of course, everybody wants to create something beautiful with their work but we must always think: will the reader like this or will they think it's hard to understand? Will they think it's ridiculous? Will they think the character is too bland and put the book down? What you've described here is an emo girl's first OC. It's not a bad thing, per se, but it's a common mistake which can easily be changed.
All in all, I recommend you change the name (if it was given by the 'normal' family) and keep the blonde-hair-blue-eyes trope, but take away the special colours... You can always add them in later.
The writing: Starting with the character's physical description can be tricky. In this case, it was poorly executed. Giving your reader a block of a description to read with make them want to stop. Try lacing your description in with actions such as 'she ran a hand through her long blonde hair' or 'as she passed in front of the mirror, she came to face her blue eyes'. Other than that, everything looks fine... Except for the dream/flashback scene. You can leave that out and keep it for a later chapter. I honestly think a revelation like that should be kept for later.
Also the bullying scene seem a bit... Off. Children don't usually attack people randomly, just because they're ugly. They're much more vile than that. You might want to keep that in mind!
Grammar, spelling mistakes and Typos: I honestly didn't find any, good job on that! Keep that up!
All in all, I don't think this deserves a five or four star rating from me, BUT it still has some potential.
Goodbye for now!
Hi there!
The 'were' here should be 'was'. See, the English language is strange. We're taught to use 'were' for multiple people. However, since you're speaking of the Davies family as a whole, as one person so to speak, you should use 'was'.
This is repetitive. You really don't need the sentence that I underlined. At the end of the first paragraph, you mention that one of the children wasn't like the rest. You can easily put a colon there so it ends up looking like: "The problem was one of their children was not like this: Hope Davies". That's one option. Or you can just start that idea in the next paragraph and tell us all about Hope then. But you'll definitely want to clear up any repetitiveness here so we don't feel like we're reading the same thing twice
Here is another place where you repeated. You used the word 'until' twice in the same sentence. Now, this isn't so much of an understanding issue as it is just plain annoying. Wow, that sounds really harsh >< I have no other way to explain it. Anyway, as readers we don't like to see repetition unless it's necessary to the overall feel of a piece. That's not the case here. Be careful with that in the future. Most of the time it's just a slip up and you don't realize that you did it.
You really want to be specific when you're writing. I know that you know exactly how old Hope was when her looks started to change. Now, I'm not talking about down to the exact year, month, day, hour and all that. I mean that you have to tell us for certain that she was seven years old. We don't know anything about her yet, so to see that you're not completely certain about her either doesn't help us much. It's always better to be more specific than not specific enough.
Aw man, I really love this line! There's so much imagery here and that simile is great. You know, this really puts into perspective how Hope is I think. Here she has this gorgeous look about her and hair that makes her look like royalty, figuratively speaking, yet no one treats her right. They all treat her terribly, really. It's so interesting to see that part of her personality and life.
This is a very interesting prologue here. I always think that prologues should be something of a mystery. What I mean by that is we shouldn't really understand what's going on much. It's all just an introduction to what is going on in the story and what is yet to come. That's exactly what you have here. I know a lot about Hope herself, but I don't know all that I want to know. That makes me want to read on, to figure out exactly who she is and what she's destined for.
One thing I have to say about this prologue though, is that it's a bit rushed near the end. I feel like you were just trying to get all the information in there so you could start on the first chapter. There isn't much detail at all about the figure that came to take her away. I get that it's supposed to be a bit of a mystery and all that, but I still would've liked to see a bit more detail about the figure. Also, I wasn't under any impression that this took place in a palace. Yet once the figure takes away Hope, you mention that the palace guards were stunned about the siege. Is the Davies family royalty? Now I'm curious.
Overall this is a good prologue. Like I mentioned before, it really has me interested in the story, and that's what a good prologue does, at least in my book. There are a few things I mentioned that you could work on, but for the most part it's written well. You've done a good job describing all of the events that took place here in this prologue and I was able to follow it very well.
Please let me know when the first chapter it out. I can't wait to read more!
Keep writing!
**Noelle**
Your first sentence is kind of opaque. I’m assuming you mean that, from the outside, the Davies look like a perfectly ordinary family? The phrasing you use doesn’t really make that clear; it could stand to be cleaned up.
The physical description of Hope kind of turned me off. It’s a pretty typical ~special~ appearance, and a LOT of characters with similar descriptions tend to be not very compelling and/or not well handled. There is, obviously, nothing wrong with Hope having an unusual, weirdly beautiful appearance, but dumping it on us in the second paragraph is a good way to turn readers off. Also, it makes it seem that Hope is only different and unusual because she looks weird, which is a kind of shallow reason for her to be so exceptional. Does she have any odd behaviors that set her apart? Or is this story from Hope’s perspective, and she’s different because of the way she thinks and feels, even if other people only notice the external oddities?
For me, it’s like—she’s a blonde in a family of brunettes and she has heterochromatic eyes. And she’s bony. Big deal—why should I care about her? What’s she LIKE? I can tell you that I’ve got short brown hair and blue eyes that look green under fluorescent lights, but that doesn’t tell you anything about *me*, and the same goes for Hope. Who is she? I don’t know. Show me.
If she’s got something to do with phoenixes, for example, you could show her climbing all the time, trying to get up high because she wants to be able to fly. Or being obsessed with fire. Or having an exceptional fondness for birds, almost as if she can talk with them. Or something. Of course, you can throw in bits of physical description as well, but when you’re building a character, behavior and feelings trumps physical appearance in terms of what the reader’s going to care about.
I think this chapter would be stronger if you picked a POV of stuck with it. Hope would be my personal choice, since she seems like the protagonist here. Once she actually shows up and starts doing stuff, she’s a cool character! She talks to birds and they follow her around, and she gets bullied and it hurts her. Those are both good, concrete things that make me care about her, like I was talking about before. (And I think beginning the story with Hope being swarmed by birds on the playground would make for a much more gripping beginning, because it’s weird and interesting and readers are more likely to keep reading stuff that’s weird and interesting from the get-go.)
The dream sequence is kind of jarring, mainly because the pacing here is messed up—it all happens so fast, and there’s almost no transition between going home and falling asleep and dreaming. Take your time with this. You don’t have to detail every single thing that happens between Hope coming home and then going to sleep at night—in fact, please don’t!—but a little more description, like maybe Hope telling her parents about the birds on the playground or something, would go a long way to make the story seem like it’s not just jumping wildly from one scene to another.
Is Hope some kind of changeling? I hope so (heh). Changeling stories can be fun. At the end, it seems like she’s being compelled or controlled by the birds somehow, almost like the dream hypnotized her? idk, but it’s an interesting premise.
Hello, my dear friend (yes, already counting you as a friend isn't criminal), wisegirl22, proud reviewer of danceofparchment's work!
. But, the princess has to be pretty, so why say she began to look worse? And why would anyone look at her like a queen, even if it did look like a crown?
This piece really captivated me. I immediately thought of Hall of Mirrors, by Margaret Peterson Haddix. About eleven knights carrying eleven babies, each raising their "children" strictly on princess subjects and knowledge in secrecy. The substitute for princess, Desmia, locks each and every one of them except one girl in prison. Eventually they find a letter to them from the queen, declaring that each of them is the princess. Cool, right? This made me think of it. Yet, I found a mistake. I think Hope looks great, with blonde hair and blue eyes. I like the purple hair
"Every day now people would whisper, point at her and laugh as she began to look worse and worse. Her hair was like a golden crown on her head, but nobody looked at her as though she were a queen."
"Mr." should always have a period after it.
"Mr Davies worked in London..."
As should "Mrs.".
"Mrs Davies was experiencing more oddities..."
This was good though, and I couldn't make it any better. Slight nit picks, the ones I just pointed out to you, were the only things I found. Never mind what other people think, you should keep writing and living in the Green Room!
-wisegirl22