Spark of Brilliance

Information

Status

Hiatus

Year

2019

Author

Reindall

• Chapter 18 - End of the assessment
  Jan 18, 2020
• Chapter 17 - The solar gun
  Jan 13, 2020
• Chapter 16 - The second battle
  Jan 8, 2020
• Chapter 15 - First battle
  Dec 31, 2019
• Chapter 14 - End of the year assessment
  Dec 28, 2019
• Chapter 13 - Types of light
  Dec 21, 2019
• Chapter 12 - Light manipulation research group
  Dec 19, 2019
• Chapter 11 - The first lectures
  Dec 17, 2019
• Chapter 10 - Choices
  Dec 15, 2019
• Chapter 9 - New Friends
  Dec 13, 2019
• Chapter 8 - Apprentice Village
  Dec 13, 2019
• Chapter 7 - Arriving at Gilsbeck
  Dec 12, 2019
• Chapter 6 - The ferry to Gilsbeck
  Dec 10, 2019
• Chapter 5 - Illumination
  Dec 10, 2019
• Chapter 4 - The Box
  Dec 8, 2019
• Chapter 3 - Joan's Magic Tools
  Dec 6, 2019
• Chapter 2 - The day after
  Dec 5, 2019
• Chapter 1 - A baleful shadow
  Dec 4, 2019

Reviews

Community Reviews(5)

• Elliot MoorsRoyal Road

  ★★★★★ 4.5

  INTRODUCTION:
  Spark of Brilliance is a little rough around the edges in terms of prose, but is carried by a deep and cleverly thought out magic system as well as brisk pacing.
  STYLE:
  The style is easily readable and is structured in such a way as to allow for easy binging. I found it a breeze to go through.
  GRAMMAR:
  There are some consistent hiccups here, primarily in terms of punctuation and sentence structure. It's still perfectly legible, and the author seems interested in making improvements to the formula, so this may change later on in the story.
  STORY:
  The plot is a tried-and-true revenge tale of a country boy who has to rise against the odds. It doesn't change up the formula much at this point in the story, but it's carried by the pacing, worldbuilding, and magic system. These three pillars make it so you're not bored while reading, but can easily let yourself get swept along by the unfolding narrative. It may not offer as much to those who don't care about magic systems or find in-depth explanations of such things boring, but I found it really intriguing, which matched up really well with the MC, who is constantly trying to learn new things about how the magic works in this world.
  It's also integrated well into the worldbuilding because the magic is used to create technology that is both reasonable in terms of what a society would need and exciting because of its potential applications.
  CHARACTER:
  So far, the characters aren't incredibly fleshed out, but they're not overly two-dimensional either. The MC's motivation is simple but relatable. I like the way the MC's core personality remains intact even though his motivation changes from simply learning magic to getting revenge. There are also some good moments with supporting characters.
  OVERALL:
  Spark of Brilliance is shaping up to be a good read, especially for those wanting a more experimental take on classic fantasy with a magitech setting. If you're a fan of hard magic systems with a lot of depth, I sinc
• MrBadWithNamesRoyal Road

  ★★★★★ 4.5

  While reading the story I have to say that the part I found most interesting and most impressive from a writer's point of view, is the world - not only is it consistent buy also written such that it doesn't stick out as a gimmick.
  I loved the part in chapter one when the MC uses magic to start a furnace and how later it's used on the light orb.
  The world itself seems interesting making it different from the generic fantasy world.
  The characters are well written - so far I liked most character interactions even the more hostile ones.
  No grammar mistakes that I could see.
  Overall a unique take one magic system and an interesting character who seems to be a little out of luck and out of place in the big city.
• javertRoyal Road

  ★★★★ 4.0

  Review written as of chapter six. This review was written as part of a review swap.
  Spark of Brilliance is about a young man named Nathan, whose girlfriend (and presumably whole family) is killed in a mysterious and completely random magical attack on the night before he's about to go off to mage school. Fortunately, this does not deter him from hitching a ride and making his way to school anyway. By chapter six, we haven't yet reached the school, but I assume that it's upcoming very shortly.
  Style
  This fiction suffers in style a little. Part of that might be chalked up to non-native English speaking author, as evidenced most strongly by egregiously misused expressions such as
  “Escort him to the harbor and make sure, he knocks on the correct door. Don't leave him out of your eyes!”
  Which is almost certainly meant to be "Don't let him out of your sight!"
  I can forgive that kind of thing, but I highly suggest that the author enlists a native English speaker to do a quick read through to catch future mistakes like that. It's jarring and takes the reader out of the story.
  Aside from quirks of language like that, some of the dialogue specifically feels extremely stilted and unnatural. There are many places where contractions should be used, because that's the way that people speak, but the words were fully written out instead.
  Varying sentence structure and running chapters through a grammar checker to catch comma splices would also both help.
  I like the author's use of description, and I don't find the narration unpleasant-- it just could use a little bit of cleanup.
  Grammar
  As with the style category, this is one of those things that's easily fixed by having another set of eyes on the chapters before they're posted. I noticed a lot of misused or missing apostrophies, comma splices, and a couple mis-punctuated dialogues. I mentioned it earlier, but comma splices are also a problem. I also caught a couple random capitalized Nouns-- author might be German. There's also so
• the_Enn_GeeRoyal Road

  ★★★★ 3.5

  This fiction has some serious potential,if the author manages to eradicate some generall roughness and a few more difficult issues.
  Style score:
  The writing style in general is very rough, riddled with many errors and not well thought-out phrases. All the errors are typical for a newby to the art of writing and can be rectified with just a bit of polish and practice.
  Story scoe:
  The story starts very strong but then goes into a lull as it slows down and finally seemsto forget almost everything about itself to go off into a completely different direction. It was engaging at first but then turned into a series of exposition-dumps.
  Grammar score:
  The grammar score suffers mostly from very minor things misapplications of commas as well as some mixups of homonyms, like "to" and "too".
  Character score:
  The characters are in no way bad, just badly presented through an unsuited style that fails to engage the reader much. It is less an issue of the characters and more of the unrefined lens we currently have to see them through.
  Overall i think this is one of the stories that could turn out to be great but should best be returned to later when the author has reviewed their writing thoroughly for the first time.
• ShadeAvatarRoyal Road

  ★★★ 3.0

  This review applies up to chapter 5
  Spark of Brilliance falls into many of the traps of beginner storytelling, many of which will be detailed below. Which is a shame, because I believe that the story is good enough that it should not be hamstrung by the above said. However with a bit of polish, I sincerely believe that this story has the potential to shine brightly.
  Style Score: 3/5
  Though there is nothing to egregious as to warrant a one or even a two, this story does have an over reliance on exposition. Often we are told how a character feels, what events happen, and etcetera, rather than being shown these things. Sometimes, we are told things even if it is plainly obvious from the text that said thing is happening. Two examples of this would be from chapter 1, quoted here:
  "'Why doesn't it work?...' he complained to himself..."
  "’Who asked you, Natalie? Mind your own business.’Annoyed by his sister...”
  Here we see that the dialogue makes the internal emotions of the character plainly apparent, however, the narration then sees fit to reiterate this, creating a redundancy that takes me out of the reading experience. Such stylistic missteps are present throughout the chapters I’ve read, among other things.
  Like I’ve said, nothing too egregious as to warrant a two, but it does break immersion and makes the otherwise breezy style of the narrative stop dead at certain times for me.
  Grammar Score: 2.5/5
  Though the prose is pretty much typo free, it does still frequently have grammatical kerfuffles of its own, the most noticeable of which would be when tenses don’t agree. Though it is not common, I’ve noticed the prose shifting from past to present tense incorrectly, sometimes within the same sentence. A key example of this would be in the first paragraph of chapter 1, which reads, “Whenever a pattern was complete, a slight blue glow emerged from the carvings...” As the tense of “is” before “complete” was “was”, complete should not be its present form and instead should