You've Got Five Pages, The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang, 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!  We see the return of the prologue in The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang, but I'm pleasantly surprised by how much she packs into that page of text. She establishes the setting of the Chinese restaurant that prospers in Wisconsin; however, the townsfolk are "indifferent" to the family's actual struggles and relationships. Even readers are kept carefully in the dark by Chang, who makes the cooking of parents Leo and Winnie the focus of her prose, full of sensual details that get your mouth watering. Yet little phrases like breadcrumbs do drop between the lines, and we realize that much is happening behind the kitchen doors that the Family Chao does not want us to see. The first chapter introduces readers to the Chao's youngest son James, a pre-med student who seems almost proud of not holding onto his Mandarin or family traditions. Yet meeting an old man at the train station pleading for help in Mandarin sparks something in James...just in time to see the old man die. At the end of five pages, the man has collapsed while boarding the train. James is unable to revive him. This opening with death isn't melodramatic, nor is it coarse; rather, it's a compelling choice on Chang's part to bring the Old World into New World James' life as he, a college student, is on his way home to his own "Old World." What will you make of these first five pages? Let's find out!