Jul 23, 2024
While the hook is kind of interesting, this is a bit of a rough first chapter. It’s not hugely engaging to read and the prose feels very stiff.
Your narrator doesn’t really feel like he has a strong voice. Everything is stated very matter-of-factly in a way that sounds more like someone recounting a story out loud than something you’d read in a book.
There’s also bits of word repetition that are awkward to read (“my room” twice in the first sentence and “today” twice in the second, for example), as well as redundant or pointless sentences and phrases along the way. If you’ve told us that MC is waking up at 7:00 and the exam is at 8:30, you don’t need to then add on that those times are an hour and a half apart. Or at least do so in a way that’s more fluid and less clunky. Despite already being a short chapter, I expect it’d be significantly shorter still if the word choice was more concise.
That being said, with some touching up this could still be a good prologue chapter. It introduces key aspects of the main character well (namely less-than-stellar intelligence and laziness/spaciness), and it sets up a mystery to keep people interested. It’s not an unsalvageable beginning, it’s just not a great one to read
