Okay… Adultery. We’re not here to talk about the moral implications of such… Or maybe we will given the story’s subject. Now, I was asked to review this last month, and for varying reasons -most of them relating to my own writing- I hadn’t gotten around to this story until now. 

Now, the story starts off with Cadence getting a letter from Princess Celestia. Shining’s been injured in a training accident, it’s not elaborated on what exactly and this is where we hit our first big problem. Celestia’s letter itself… it’s very flat, and emotionless. Like this is an inconvenience to her, ‘Too bad so sad!’ is the tone you get from the letter.

The grammar is absolutely horrendous. Yes, I get this was a bit of a rush job for a contest but that’s no excuse not to go back over and look over the story one more time. Run-ons, sentence fragments, pronoun agreement errors! My god... And this story had two pre-readers and an editor. I would suggest firing them. 

But it actually gets… better. There was this section about when Cadence is explained how a coma works.

Coma patients either wake up within a few days or even up to four weeks after going into a coma, or remain in a coma or vegative state for the rest of their lives.

Now, I did a bit of double-checking as this sounded… off to me, and lo and behold it turns out this is taken almost word for word from an article. ...Do I need to stress how wrong this is? This is basically outright plagiarism! This is something students learn not to do!

Now, the story itself… well, I’ll be bluntly honest. It needs a lot of work. Now, the adultery itself. It comes out of nowhere, with Zecora and Cadence basically doing the deed with no foreshadowing whatsoever. Cadence herself is whiny and weepy, which is sorta understandable given the situation but it’s taken to egregious levels here. It’s like a Nick Sparks novel, actually.

And do I need to even get into the moral implications of having sex with someone else while your husband is in a coma, possibly dying of his injuries?

I can tell the author was trying, and this was a very daring idea but the entire story basically more or less… fell flat in the second half when the adultery was introduced. The story doesn’t even end conclusively, with Cadence standing over her husband’s bed just hoping he’ll wake up.

This is not a good story. It’s certainly a daring story, but daring does not a good story make.

4/10