Heh, late, but here's my critique. In reference to your latest comment...I'd warn you against collaboration personally unless you have more experience. Or, at the least, I'd work on a project by yourself too on the side. That way, you can move forward and learn at your own pace as well as your partner's.
I like the fact you don't give away all of Aliese's background at once, though I think you could add some great humor with vague references. "And then there was the incident with the claustrophic rabbit..." [Brandon Sanderson did this a lot in Alcatraz with the "broken chicken"-type references] The fact that she is intelligent enough to use her teachers and do alliances creates a bond with me, which is good. I like intelligent characters.
I think you need to work on the "in-late" thing. Skip Aliese sliding the walls and find the first actual real-time conflict. The biggest problem is...that doesn't happen. We don't have any stakes. How unpleasant would it really be if Jade and Ian catch her? A mild scolding? Why does it matter? Since I don't know the stakes, I find myself skimming the garden chase. It might help if I felt her fear--heart pounding/sweat/etc. Otherwise, jump to a place where she a) gets caught b) is threatened somehow, physically or otherwise. The chase is meant to create tension, but it just isn't as written. A lot of that has to do with the fact I know her mother is influential, so chances are there will be no repercussions on her for sneaking around.
There's a lot of info-dumping that could probably be cut, such as dreaming about being a diplomat for the king, etc. I don't think you need to info-dump about the magic system at the moment. I would introduce a touch of mystery by leaving more out, personally-- ie "she made a gesture and smiled as the dice cups fell over". Make the reader wonder a bit more what she does/how she does it/what she's capable of. Mysteries (when done right) are my favorite hooks.
I think you have a nice clean style that's very clear. I don't feel confused, which is good, because I am easily confused. However, I think you could punch things up with stronger verbs and ruthlessly cutting extra words. "She dove through the thorns, ignoring the scratches on her arms as they tore at her shirt." BAM! That gets rid of five or six sentences of redundant information. Because of the mild verbs, I'm not getting a sense of the character's voice, or how she is different from other McCafferey-style fantasy heroines.
Part of your voice problem is your rigid sentence structure. For example, in one place, I counted four "she's" in a row to begin a sentence, ie. "She (verb) (object). She (verb) (object)" which is a little hard on your reader.
Hmm, you spend more time describing the hedges than the dome/magical wasteland, which is a strange balance given that I bet your dome is more important to your story than a thorny bush. You also need to mention that the dome covers the city and then some--for a moment I thought she'd left the dome when she went into the forest. Unless the pasture/forest is inside the city, somehow?
Yeah, I might run away from the summons. Or at least call them something different. Unless you do something brilliant in the first few pages, seeing the word "Summons" is enough to make me put the book down and start playing Final Fantasy instead. Does anyone else remember wandering through the cave of the summons with Rydia in FFIV (I think--or it could have been III)? That place rocked.
And the whole Snow White thing with all the creatures gathered around her is...weird. Your character says she finds it creepy. If that's what you're going for, ramp it up! Make the animals like the critters christmas' evil things from South Park.
The conversation with Zellenya is a little on the boring side. It doesn't seem to offer the reader any useful new info. I don't know what advice to give you about writing un-cliche dialogue other than to practice. Too many names dropped all at once. Definitely could use some cutting. Unless Zellenya's cooking is essential to the plot...
Yeah, the horses confused me, too. Definite Valdemar flashbacks. Why didn't the horse go to the stablemaster in the first place? Why do you have horses anyway in a domed civilization? I would think that the gain/loss tradeoff of how much food they use versus their utility since no one ever has that far to travel would mean that the limited pastureland goes to cattle and sheep instead. I would expect sedan chairs with laborers to carry the nobility around, especially since you likely have an impoverished class of people who cannot escape the city. I hope you go into the economics of dome-land, because that would be interesting. I guess the dome is fairly recent, otherwise diplomacy isn't really necessary since there's no one to negotiate with, and that ended Aliese's dreams.
The near-dead foal problem got solved too easily. I think you can throw in some more tension.
I'm okay with the physical energy becomes magic thing as well as a base elemental system. I don't love it, but I don't hate it, either.
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In general:
To me, I don't mind cliched characters/settings/magic systems so much. My own book is very cliche, unfortunately. I feel like compelling characters/plot elements can save a cliche from being unreadable. (Example, Name of the Wind handles the magic school cliche well).
Even if you as an author feel discouraged by your book's cliched-ness--keep writing anyway! I found that I had to get all my cliched ideas out on paper in this current book I'm writing before I could move on and do something more innovative. Like Guy Gavriel Kay, who wrote the Fionavar tapestry (well-written Tolkein/C.S. Lewis/Susan Cooper cliche--and is so well done it's one of my favorite series despite the overuse of genre stereotypes) before he moved on to his more interesting alternative history works. Similarly, Neil Gaimon wrote a lot of cliche comic book dialogue and plots before he started writing amazingly different/creative novels. So work with the cliche, love the cliche, develop as a writer, then abandon the cliche. And cliche-d ness doesn't matter so much in MG/YA, I think, if that's what you're going for.
My advice: 1) Write down what you NEED to achieve with this chapter and go to that. Cut everything else. Structure your tidbits of character information around that important info/action. Right now, there's no threat. No stakes. I think that's going to be a bigger problem for you than magic schools and stiff dialogue. Maybe if you start the chapter with saving the horse.
I won't deny this needs a lot of work, but I wouldn't call it an eye-scratcher.
There's an entire thread dedicated to Frog-bashing? Wow. I'm jealous