You've Got Five Pages, Gallant by V.E. Schwab, to Tell Me You're Good.

The first chapter can make or break a reader's engagement with a story. We as writers must craft brilliant opening pages in order to hook those picky readers, so let's study the stories of others to see how they do it!  Once again, we've got a story with a "bait and switch" kind of prologue. There is a single page before Chapter 1 that comes from what I imagine to be the antagonist's point of view, establishing this deadly hidden realm that is thirsting for the life on our side of "the wall." The prose itself? Lovely. The angatonist? Threatening. The shadow realm? Eerie.  But was that trip really necessary? For the first chapter of Gallant by V.E. Schwab is a marvelous introduction to protagonist Olivia and her blessing/curse of seeing ghouls. We see Olivia dealing with the relatable bully conflict in a school setting, and the foreshadowing of this school teaching girls to be "ghosts in other people's homes" is an excellent allusion to whatever the shadow realm. Olivia's plight and life intrigue us as readers, and the scene with the ghoul in the garden shed is an excellent first exposure to the supernatural element at work in the story. So as a writer, I wonder why on earth we needed the dramatic peek at the antagonist at all. It feels like an unnecessary show of life-and-death stakes rather than letting the story reach that point organically. And what will you, fellow creative, learn in the first five pages? Let's find out!