Review by Kit: Mystical Realm 📗

                                    

                                          
Reviewer: KitZimmerman
Book: Mystical Realm by EnamiDah
Book Title: 3/5
While the title itself aligns with a setting in the story, it is not inherently original, catchy, or intriguing.
Book Cover: 4/5
The cover has nearly every element it needs to be successful, with the exception of one—context. Aside from the title and blurb, this is the first point of contact for readers, meaning it needs to use every possible angle to draw them in. With that said, the cover itself leaves some elements to be desired, specifically in how it might hint at what's to come.
Summary: 2.5/5
I admit, I am hard on blurbs, but that isn't without reason. I am a writer, but my spouse is a marketer, and a good one—and her's is the superior skill set regarding blurb crafting. (A hard-learned lesson on my part. Trust me, I've pushed back on a lot, but she's right: Every. Single. Time.) Blurbs are something we work on together because they require skill sets that most authors have not developed.
Although Mystical Realm's blurb hits the market standard of 100-200 words—110, at the time of this review, to be exact— there isn't actually a lot happening. Rhetorical questions and excerpts (no matter how well-written) often fail as marketing ploys to draw readers in—they are extra tools better used as taglines, not the heavy-lifters for garnering interest. 
What's needed is an establishment of what's personally at stake for the protagonist(s), their internal conflict(s) (and, ideally, how it relates to an external one)—not generalization or focus on what would be at stake for just anyone. In other words, readers need to be given a reason to care at the onset—an emotional hook, as it were. A focus on plot in a blurb has been proven to be secondary (unless you're writing one for a successful, pre-existing universe like Marvel, but even then, I would advise against it).
Grammar & Punctuation: 3/5
There were noticeable mistakes, though they weren't severe enough to make reading too "cringe". From a semantic perspective, incongruent word choice was perhaps the most glaring of grammatical elements. This is where I advise writers to challenge not just every sentence or phrase, but also every word choice during the revision (not editing) process.
Character Building: 1/5
Character development was perhaps one of the weakest areas of Mystical Realm. In my opinion, the issue is rooted not in just any one area of the narrative but perhaps in a few. Although I won't elaborate on all the finer details of what makes for strong character development, I will expand on it further in the Reader Engagement section and offer some supplementary feedback directly below.
The first thing I was left wondering was: How old are these students? They seem very young, perhaps in upper grade school, but they navigate attire and society like adults (e.g., ordering drinks at a bar). There's not much to suggest they're in college—if anything, it's the opposite. This incongruency left me scratching my head and also raised concerns about possible breaches in Wattpad Content guidelines.
My second question: Where does this take place in the real world? Setting can give context for other important elements like cultural and historical influences (i.e., why so many names begin with the letter "Z").
This third point arises more out of a personal pet peeve than anything else: there are a lot of characters whose names begin with "Z". There were enough to at least make them difficult to track, especially since characters felt two-dimensional and therefore indiscernible from one another. If the reasoning for these names exists solely because one finds the sound alluring, I would suggest another angle to inform those decisions, as those biases often bleed through one's work in unintended ways (e.g., readability).