so im going to be upfront and say ive only made it to around chapter 20 but I see a lot of early problems. first there is barely any sense of scale or description of the city the mc is in. you can assume its a capital cuty as its the city the king lives. you get no sense of how big the city is what It looks like no contrast between the rich and the poor areas little to no description on the buildings so it feels pretty dull and you have to do a lot of work on the reading end to fill these large blanks. the pacing is rediculously fast and a lot of things are either explained retroactively when they have to inform the mc’s decision. we just have to go along with it and accept the decision as a good one becuase we have nothing to inform a what would we do scenario. this was the main thing that bothered my with the fleeing the kingdom decision because we have no sense of scale, how long would he have to travel I wonder? a day apparently. to escape a KINGDOM. you are told that “oh yeah btw this whole kingdom is built to serve the nobles” with no supporting evidence of people being treated like dirt and nobles stompimg over everyone nobody treats mc badly other than random thug 1, 2, and 3. some things are shockily modern like a shower and toothpaste which just makes the worldbuilding even more out of wack. im relatively detail oriented and when a world almost completely lacks details and causality ouside the mc I kinda get really bored really fast. if youre the same well I say you probably wont like this book much. some advice for the author that you can take into consideration if you want: fantasy is a pretty rough place to start writing because you have to build a whole world from scratch because there are no irl places you can really use to inform peoples understanding of your new world especially when its technological development is vastly behind ours. I mention detail above and just sparse amounts to give the citty some sense of scale is the size of houses a simple line of densly packed two story buildings can make a city seem super bustling and you can contrast it with something like the streets emptied like mice escaping a hungry cat when say the thugs show up. it can show that the whole street take these people seriously and makes them seem more dangerous. you could also have the surrounding people act like nothing was happening or support the thugs to show the worlds attitude towards the mc. by no means must this advice be followed but things like this really help pit things in perspective for the reader and helps build suspense
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