Mar 20, 2025
I hope you don't mind some detailed feedback.
First, it's clear that you k ow the genre and are passionate about it. That's good, because you can't teach that stuff.
Things that could improve here are, thankfully, teachable. There is a very high level of exposition or words that explain. Most professional writers will have less of this. You can reduce the amount of description, but also "make it do more".
For example, rather than tell is the character knows the library well, you show us that he has a special path he learned by experience. Search for "show vs tell" and you'll find plenty of people talking about making descriptions do more in fewer words by "showing" instead of "telling". Showing is usually faster, more interesting, and can accomplish multiple goals at once.
There are paragraphs in this chapter that might benefit from this approach.
My current book also has a short character introduced in chapter 2. What things did I do better or worse compared to how this chapter handled it? That might give you some ideas.
Keep writing!
