Review by bbquigley -- The Raven's Trail (Book 1)

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bbquigley
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Joined: 04 Jan 2021, 11:21
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Latest Review: The Raven's Trail (Book 1) by Liz D. Marx

Review by bbquigley -- The Raven's Trail (Book 1)

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[Following is a volunteer review of "The Raven's Trail (Book 1)" by Liz D. Marx.]
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2 out of 4 stars
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A young girl, Chloe, is accompanied by an imaginary friend who turns out to be a goddess from the Tula Native American tribe. She grows up to work with Native American artifacts and stumbles upon a magic binding stone that inevitably leads her to the warrior and prince, Mason. He helps Chloe find the stone’s origin whilst being chased by a group of mercenaries that try to kill them both. Will they find where the stone came from or will death intervene first?

The Raven’s Trail by Liz D. Marx is an adventure fantasy and romance novel that intertwines cultural and historical fiction. This quick read has a moderate amount of action with slight profanity and innuendos making it appropriate for the Young Adult category.

The story is intriguing and reels the reader in. The adventure and action aspects make it quite suspenseful so it was hard to put down at times. This story would be great as a television series.

Even though the plot was enjoyable, there were many grammatical and typographical errors. This novel has been poorly edited. I kept getting taken out of the story because of these inconsistencies and errors, which ruined the suspense and reading experience. There were many simple mistakes such as not putting the punctuation inside of the quotation marks or adding in extra words that result in the sentence not making sense.

Other than the poor editing of Marx’s novel, the story pulls the reader in with creative ideas, good character development, and an interesting plot twist at the end.

Creating the character, Chloe, to be a Caucasian girl that has a Native American spirit inside her was quite innovative. It really shows the power of reincarnation and provides cultural awareness about common Native American beliefs. Marx had seamless transitions going back-and-forth between present tense and flashbacks of Chloe and her spirit’s memories. Through these transitions, Mason’s character development is strong and apparent through his perseverance in enduring a curse. Lastly, the plot twist is an intriguing cliffhanger revealed in the last chapter alluding to the next story; I am excited to read the second novel.

I thoroughly enjoyed this story and think it would be a big hit as a series on a streaming service, but the amount of grammatical and typographical errors were enough to bring The Raven’s Trail down to 2 out of 4 stars. This book does not deserve one star because of how well executed the plot is, but the editing is too poor to earn three stars. Once Marx’s novel has gone through more professional editing, I would highly recommend this book to lovers of adventure, suspense, and romance.

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The Raven's Trail (Book 1)
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