Reviewing with River

Do you look at the plot, the characters, and the way that the author puts words together?

Yes, for a few reasons. I love well-rounded characters and carefully constructed words. A lot of my close reading of this stuff is more for my benefit, because I love deconstructing how they did what they did. Sometimes, I just get bold and flat-out ask them.

Do you like stories that have a lot of action or a lot of character development?

If it's an action-oriented story with a tight word count, I'd prefer the action, especially because action scenes are tricky critters to write properly.

I enjoy character development that has careful construction - by that I mean lack of info-dumping (which I myself am totally guilty of) and genuinely built characters that feel like real people.

I'm also a big fan of well-constructed dialogue. A large chunk of characterization can be not only what the character says, but also how they say it. and if the dialogue is wooden or stunted, the character falls flat most of the time (unless that's the character's way lol).

I see the irony in the fact that I often write stories without dialogue (before anyone calls me out on it).

Do you like authors to use a lot of complicated words, or very simple words?

Yes, but not to the point of the prose being obtuse or obfuscating the point (see what I did there?? ). Despite the trend of simpler words and shorter sentences, I still am, and likely always will be, a fan of woven sentences that incorporate what we'd call 'flowery' in truly poetic ways. Sentences can be complex and intricate without being impossible to read.

I don't like convoluted. It's a fine line between 'hot mess' and 'stunning', which is kind of weird. And I don't like when a plot is sacrificed in favour of language (I'm looking at you, Night Circus) OR when plot is sacrificed simply for the sake of brevity.

That said, I've come across a few tight-knit high fantasy of late that managed to do both the modern take with the stellar writing.

JY Yang's Tensorate novella series (it is silkpunk with a non-binary gender universe) is a pretty good example. Second book is better than the first action-wise, but the first book is well-done backstory.

(and as an aside: true story, one of the reviews for The Night Circus sums it up completely with "Wedding cakes are often the prettiest cakes, but they are rarely the tastiest cakes." If you loved the book, I'm sorry. I think it's beautifully written. I hated the story.)

*I have zero idea if any of what I posted is actually on topic