story recommendation: sentinels

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"Sentinels" by Dilek@mibba
August 31/10, written by Taylor

Dilek has already been featured once on Chalk for our May interview, but the attention has returned once more to her for the wonderful piece of literature otherwise known as Sentinels. The story is set back in the 1800’s, telling the story of young Melinda who longs to be married to her love against the wishes of her family, with the pressure of money and status weighing on her shoulders. We follow Melinda in her own personal accounts through a time filled with inequality, tradition, societal pressures, and the age-old fight for love.

The story is filled with rich details that paints the scene down to the finest sliver of thread. Do not be fooled by the length of the text that each chapter is made of, because once you are sucked into the richness of the visuals, you will never want to stop reading. Each scene is built up from the ground with detail that it feels at times that you are truly watching a movie, not reading a piece of fiction. Dilek’s strength is obviously her descriptions and her ability to breathe life into an era that readers are not familiar with.

But the story isn’t just all about detail and the woes of a young woman. The story is fused with a mystery that you get a quick peek at in the beginning, and then she hides that until far later in the story. The questions and assumptions will plague you until the very end, or until her latest instalment. Sentinels is still a work in progress, but it is one you must wait for.

If historical accounts and rich detail isn’t a story you think you would fancy, I suggest you read it anyway. Because once you step inside of Dilek’s world that is known as Sentinels, there’s no knowing when you will return. Sentinels gets 9 handsome Dukes out of 10.

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Alyssa
the rex;@mibba

"Writing…is my life. I love writing so much that I tend to disregard everything else that’s happening in the world just to spend time with myself and my characters. Sometimes I wish I could be “normal” and then I realize that being who I am, and what I am, makes me special because, if I think really hard on it, I know myself. I know every little thing that there is to know about me because tiny bits of my persona are in every last stinking one of my characters. I’ve been wounded with very few negative comments and have grown from them, maturing as both a person and a writer. There’s no substitute for the rush of getting comments on a story, or the serenity of being alone with people that aren’t real. I know that I have potential; I just really want other people to see it too."

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