Hey Storm! Like I mentioned, this is probably going to be my last review for a while. I'm actually feeling kind of burnt out on this novel, but I promise I'll make this review count. I'll mainly be basing it off the last 4 chapters, but there will be elements from the novel as a whole.
I want to make it very clear that I do not hate your novel. I think it's an important story that deserves to be told, and you're telling it in a way that no one else can, because you're coming at it with your personal experience. You view it through a different lens than anyone else, and that puts you as the writer at a unique advantage.
I want to make this clear because of one thing: In attempting to be the most diverse novel it can be, your story has fallen flat and become bloated with racist tropes and stereotypes.
This is a fantasy world. I get that. But if you intend for your fantasy world to have the same or similar racial politics to the real world, you'll have to accept that readers are going to project the real world -- to an extent -- onto your writing. So while I accept that this isn't actually England, Africa, or Japan, I'm by default going to be judging these characters as if they're English, African, or Japanese. Because they are, because that's what you've made them.
So let's start with your English people. We have not been introduced to a single good English person. We haven't seen their side of the story at all. In fact, we seem to have forgotten about them -- and the entire plot -- in very short order, but we'll get to that at a later point. For now: your evil is one-dimensional and entirely based on race, as we don't meet "evil" African or Japanese people that haven't been influenced by the people of England.
Moving on to your African people: No legit, what country/countries are you using as a basis for their culture? I couldn't find anything when googling some of your key words and names. Asha is a very common name in multiple cultures, originating in Sanskrit, and Balewa seems to be Nigerian -- but mtuwachi is Chichewa, unless I'm incorrect, and doesn't really seem to make sense in context (meaning "this one" or "his/her/its head"). Pro tip, unless you plan on constructing your entire world from the ground up, using solid examples of real world cultures (especially when you've already used two) helps a lot when figuring out how a society would have progressed given magic or higher technology.
Also, please please please research actual African biomes. Africa is not just desert, and to see you ignore the lush forests, jungles, mountains and rivers that course through the continent hurts my heart. Especially if you're going to draw from the Chichewa and Shona languages, which are seated in an area with beautiful lush grasslands, meadows, and forested hills. Your bias really shows when the way you transition into your Africa-country is by saying basically "everything was brown and sparse and desert-y".
For the Japanese people -- I'm not Japanese and not super well versed in Japanese culture, but it's kind of stereotypical that all of your Japanese people don't express emotion in public, and the ones who do seem to be the odd ducks. All of them have accents, even though Asha doesn't? And she's probably been speaking English for less time than they have, especially the royalty (wouldn't multilingualism be a requirement for kings and queens? Not so much for village mage girls who are younger than all of them). Also, you've removed the religion and part of the culture (the Emperor as a holy figure) that is a big part of Japanese history, so you've got to think about how to alter the society itself to reflect that.
Okay, that's people in a very small, very simple nutshell. Now let's go for plot.
Where is it again?
That's right -- we start out the novel with the English people proposing they use Asha to enslave people to become human familiars. That's terrifying. That has stakes! That has emotional power!
And then she runs away with her queer lover and the plot is never seen again.
Legitimately, after chapter 3 we get... Asha's village has been ransacked, along with others, and the Evulz are taking over Africa. They fight the Evulz, they lose -- and Asha runs away. We spend the next four chapters travelling to Japan, with a random fight thrown in for good measure, and 5 chapters after that indulging ourselves in Japanese culture and engaging in romantic drama.
What about those people who were being enslaved? What? Who? Oh, they don't matter to the story any more, I guess. We're focusing on romance instead.
I know you said you've pre-written a lot of this, but it's bad. Like, this has been 13k words since we last really saw the plot -- that's 47% of what you have posted. I know you wanted to get into the romance, but this way, nothing works. The romance has no support so it falls flat. The plot has no focus so the reader doesn't care. These are things that need attention, otherwise it looks like your plot only exists to show Colonialism and Slavery Are Bad, and your romance only exists to show that Gay People Are Good.
Here's the thing: having an anti-racist message and a queer main couple aren't going to save this story.
One of your problems: You're so focused on making sure the reader understands Colonialism Is Bad that you don't try to actually develop your villains. They seem to just be in it for the Evulz, and we don't get to see anything from their point of view that makes us think -- even for half a second -- that Asha might be wrong or her struggle might be futile. We don't get the stakes, we don't get the will-she-win, because she's Good and Right and Good Always Wins. It's simple. Clean-cut.
Boring.
See, you give us these situations where Asha can lose -- and she does lose, once! -- but you take the wind out of the story's sails by giving her an easy way out or letting her cop out of consequences. She gets to her village after it's already been ransacked, but that sorrow only shows up here and there when it's convenient for her character. It doesn't really affect her, much like that second village doesn't affect her, that fight in the colonial town doesn't affect her. She doesn't change. At all.
She stays the same, and that is one of this story's greatest sins. There is no effect on the world or the characters from anything that happens. The closest you get is with the romance. So if you don't want to write the characters suffering through a life-changing racial war... Drop it and just write the romance instead. It'll probably work better than trying to shoehorn in saving an entire people with political marriages and so forth anyway.
The last thing we see of the plot is Asha and Yuni losing a fight with the implication that people are being enslaved and being killed for magical gain. You know what, that brings me to my next point:
Emotional stakes. You have none.
To put it nicely, at one point your main character says, verbatim, "I don't make mistakes." And then she... doesn't make a mistake. She doesn't overestimate herself or her power. Nothing goes wrong, not even in the littlest way. Everything is okay.
That's one of the most frustrating parts of a book. Why is everything okay when, by all rights, it shouldn't be?
You give us gut-punch conflicts. People being enslaved. People being killed. And then you snatch them all away from us in favor of a romance that we figured was going to happen, doesn't really have textual support, and ends up being entirely based on jealousy and envy by chapter 23.
You can't just... threaten your reader with emotions and then take them away like this. It's not fair to us because we're in this for Asha unravelling a colonial society and rescuing her people. We're not in this for a Travel Channel special on Japan. If your plot can't stay focused, your reader is going to lose their investment in the story.
And my last point, because this review is long and I'm tired:
This is a Diversity Novel. You have written this novel to check off boxes on a diversity chart. Check! You have queer MCs. Check! Your MCs are non-white. Check! Your good NPCs are non-white.
This does not give any of these people character. This does not give any of these identities weight or actual representation. As it is, Asha, Yuni, and the rest are all token characters -- your token queer black woman, your token queer Japanese woman -- who represent a very small portion of their culture. You show us through your narration that this very small portion of their culture is, in fact, their entire culture in this story. You've failed to give your main characters character and as a result they're not people but cardboard cutouts you're using to show how diverse and representative you are.
Also, representation doesn't work when you pick the most stereotypical examples of a culture or people and play them out to the stereotypes. African pseudo-tribal colonial village girl? Check. Meek Japanese princess? Check.
We don't see how people are different from each other. We don't see nuances in the culture or the representation. It's basically meaningless, and it's worse than if you wrote a story about all white people who weren't caricatures of their race. You are quite literally doing harm to the people you claim to be representing.
Also, Asha's sorrow over Khari and many other things only seem to exist at the convenience of chapter word counts. Work them in to some kind of permanence or it'll be really obvious that they only come up when a chapter might come up short otherwise.
Hopefully this helps. Like I said, this'll be my last review on this for a while, but I'm looking forward to seeing what you do when you replan for draft 2. Tag me if you post it!
Keep writing!
Points: 50
Reviews: 425
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