You've Got Five Pages...To Tell Me It's Good

Jean Lee
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Formerly Story Cuppings! Every month we visit the local library to randomly select a new release and read its first chapter. As writers, we are told that those opening pages are crucial to hooking readers. So, let's see if the first chapter successfully hooks picky readers as well as teaches fellow hardworking writers. Cheers!

  1. You've Got Five Pages, Alchemised by SenLinYu, to Tell Me You're Good.

    2 DAYS AGO

    You've Got Five Pages, Alchemised by SenLinYu, to Tell Me You're Good.

    Welcome back, my fellow creatives! Yup, I'm back to looking at the first five pages of various stories, for those five pages can make or break the engagement of a reader--or an agent. So, let's scope out the stories of others to see how they hook an audience! Now I admit that I was hesitant at first when I opened the book and saw a prologue. But thankfully, this prologue did its job. In its single page, we meet Helena as she struggles to keep her memories while in "stasis," a sensory deprivation container where she is jolted with electricity every few hours until "someone" comes to get her. Only that someone does not come. Helena loses her sense of time, but she knows her purpose: "She had to stay ready." Not that she tells readers what that means. And that's okay. I don't want an exposition dump in the prologue. Chapter 1 starts with two men discovering Helena, who was "stored wrong," and she lashes out to try and escape even though her senses are completely overwhelmed. They knock her out, and she wakes to hear a woman speak of carrying her to "Central" because there are no prisoner records of Helena, and yet she has two numbers. She's also alive and literally kicking, unlike most of the other statis residents. I tip my hat to SenLinYu for using Helena's lack of senses for storytelling purposes. Helena can't see or move around much, so the only input Helena--and therefore readers--can get in these early pages is through dialogue. And SenLinYu uses that dialogue to accomplish some quick worldbuilding without overwhelming the readers. There's a High Necromancer mentioned, and the woman orders that any corpses in stasis chambers should be reanimated for labor. WHAAAAAT? But the dust jacket did mention necromancy, and here we are on the third page of the book hearing about the necromancy. There's also a degree of science involved in this world, too, for Helena was in some sort of special gel and often jolted with electricity. And on top of all that, there is also magic besides necromancy, for the woman alters Helena's senses to make it easier for her to use her eyes. The prose style here is solid, too. SenLinYu reminds me a little of Lee Child, putting a mix of short and long sentences to use so that the narrative pacing is fast without the prose feeling choppy. A good example comes when Helena is first awoken by the men going through all the stasis chambers. "Light was stabbing her. A spike driven through her eyes, burrowing into her skull. Gods, her eyes.She writhed. The brightness blurred, careening. The burn of fluid rushed down her throat. A roar in her ears." If the first five pages are any indication, SenLinYu's got a lovely debut on their hands. And what will we discover in the next story's five pages?We'll have to wait and see. xxxx Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

    20 min
  2. You've Got Five Pages, Evil Bones by Kathy Reichs, to Tell Me You're Good.

    30 JAN

    You've Got Five Pages, Evil Bones by Kathy Reichs, to Tell Me You're Good.

    Welcome back, my fellow creatives! Yup, I'm back to looking at the first five pages of various stories, for those five pages can make or break the engagement of a reader--or an agent. So, let's scope out the stories of others to see how they hook an audience! The prologue focuses on an elderly woman who should not bedriving in a rainstorm. She constantly puts herself down through all the prayers and panic in the weather. While this emotional/environmental pacing works fine, the prose here gets...odd. For example: Brake now! A cluster of panicky neurons bellowed.Waiting until you can safely pull off! a more rational gaggle countermanded. Bellowing neurons countermanded by a gaggle of neurons.... Come again? Awkward bits like this made it very difficult to care whatwas going on with this woman, and considering this book is a thriller, I should care about what happens to this vulnerable old woman. But this is a prologue, and with such awkward prose I'm just powering through to see what Chapter 1 islike. And sure enough, Chapter 1 is different. It's first-personnarration from Temperance the protagonist, bemused by a frog she hears outside her office. She's supposed to be annotating reports from all her cases that year, and she lists some major categories of those cases involving skeletalremains, how they're found, etc. Typically, exposition like this could turn readers off, but after that awkward prologue, I found this approach refreshing. I'm a first-timer with this series, and within a page and a half I got a good senseof this character, her personality, and her field of expertise. Plus, by page 3 of the first chapter, Temperance is called to visit an old lady who crashed her car in a storm because she was shocked by an animal mutilation. Why on earth did we need the prologue when the first chapter was going to warp us over to the scene of the crime anyway? Yet another case of the prologue doing no favors. The firstchapter could have hooked us and reeled us in for the inciting incident without a problem. Readers do not have to see preludes to The Incident, especially when that prelude is prioritizing elements barely tangential to the storyline. Letreaders imagine the prelude on their own terms, or allow unreliable character narrators to share their perspectives. It's just another way to throw fresh layers of mystery over the plot to keep readers moving forward, ever curious about what hides in the storm. And what will we discover in the next story's five pages?We'll have to wait and see. xxxx Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

    17 min
  3. You’ve Got Five Pages, Alchemy of Secrets by Stephanie Garber, to Tell Me You’re Good.

    28/11/2025

    You’ve Got Five Pages, Alchemy of Secrets by Stephanie Garber, to Tell Me You’re Good.

    Welcome back, my fellow creatives! Yup, I'm back to looking at the first five pages of variousstories, for those five pages can make or break the engagement of a reader--or an agent. So, let's scope out the stories of others to see how they hook anaudience! Honestly, I've a few gripes here. For one, I really don't like second-person for a pov. Just because one can do a thing doesn't mean one should. It's also jarring because the book doesn't stay in second-person; only the prologue talks to readers like they are the protagonist Holland finding the mysterious theater with the mysterious college class about folklore. Don't get me wrong: the theater's beautifully described, and Garber knows how to build up tension by using the present tense for Holland — well, the reader — waiting for that class to start. But it's a weird shift putting readers into Holland's shoes for three pages before yanking them out for a more traditional third-person in the first chapter. The true first chapter starts with a date and some exposition about this too-perfect guy that Holland is seeing, aaaaand I was already getting a bit bored when my reading ended with her discovering a poster mentioned in her mysterious folklore class. There's a lot of promise here with the magical underworld of L.A., and fans of Garber are likely accustomed to her writing quirks to be ready for pov shifts and meet-cute exposition. But the magic of that theater in the prologue felt like a bait-and-switch. It can be tough to know when a story truly begins. It feels like Garber considers Holland's date and search for something she heard about in the folklore class to be the start of the story...but if readers don't know about the magic of the class, then they won't understand Holland's determination to do that search. The prologue feels like a cheat to cover this, and I'm just not a fan. I'm taking December off from blogging and podcasting, so we'll have to see what stories await us in the new year! Stay tuned! And what will we discover in the next story's five pages?We'll have to wait and see. xxxx Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

    18 min
  4. You've Got Five Pages, The Lake Escape by Jamie Day, to Tell Me You're Good.

    24/10/2025

    You've Got Five Pages, The Lake Escape by Jamie Day, to Tell Me You're Good.

    Welcome back, my fellow creatives! Yup, I'm back to looking at the first five pages of various stories, for those five pages can make or break the engagement of a reader--or an agent. So, let's scope out the stories of others to see how they hook an audience! I admit that I wasn't sure what to expect from this one. I knew it to be some sort of suspense thriller, but the blurb on my hardcover from the library says, "Still waters run deadly." I was hoping for some sort of lake monster! Alas, I have no idea if such a monster awaits or not. Day starts this book with two little, um, blocks of text. They're not prologues per se; one is a newspaper excerpt about a dead body found near the lake, and one is about the lake waking up in spring, and danger lurks there. These two "mini-beginnings" before the actual beginning felt a bit awkward, but I gave the author a pass. They're establishing a sense of menace and foreshadowing, right? They want to make sure the reader catches this important information so they don't miss it in the regular storytelling. Fine.Chapter 1 officially begins with protagonist Julia infuriated because her lifelong friend had the audacity to build a new lake house that obstructs the view of the lake from her lake house. There's extra emphasis on how she and her husband are broke, yet they got a fancy new car and, well, have a lake house on top of wherever else they live. She cannot believe she'll have to take a different kind of walk down to the lake. She cannot believe her friend installed art in the yard. She cannot believe some trees were cleared. And surely their other friend and fellow lake house owner will be just as mad. I had to stop after three pages of this. Stories need characters readers can connect with. Yes, some stories can star assholes. Plenty of classics contain such characters. Heavens, I've written such characters. But there has to be an ability to connect SOMEWHERE, and listening to someone complain about how their friend changed up their house and ruined their lake view got very tiring very fast. Sure, maybe this pettiness speaks to the protagonist's character and possible character arc. But the first five pages need to compel readers to read on, at least to chapter 2. A writer shouldn't assume that a brief news report of discovered skeletal remains will be enough to keep regular readers engaged while a protagonist complains nonstop about a privileged kind of problem. Let’s see what next month’s find will teach us, shall we? Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

    18 min
  5. You've Got Five Pages, Breathe In, Bleed Out by Brian McAuley, to Tell Me You're Good.

    26/09/2025

    You've Got Five Pages, Breathe In, Bleed Out by Brian McAuley, to Tell Me You're Good.

    Welcome back, my fellow creatives! Yup, I'm back to looking at the first five pages of various stories, for those five pages can make or break the engagement of a reader--or an agent. So, let's scope out the stories of others to see how they hook an audience! It's not often I see fake-outs in a book, but be damned if McAuley doesn't pull it off MULTIPLE TIMES in just half a dozen pages.The first line packs a punch: "Dragging a body through six inches of snow is even harder than I expected." A reader can make plenty of assumptions based on the first line, let alone the first page. We first meet the narrator the dead body of someone named Ben through the snow. At first, I thought she was dragging him to bury him in the wilderness, but then on the second page we learn she wants to get his body back to his family because he deserves a proper funeral...though what happened to him, we don't know, only that his chest is full of puncture wounds. But by the fourth page, Ben's body disappears to be replaced by a ghost addressing Hannah. And then Hannah wakes with Ben alive by her side. And then cold starts setting in with Ben interrogating her about his death. And then he vanishes, and Hannah is alone.McAuley deftly balances the immediate action of each page, whether it's hauling a carcass in the snow or a loving embrace with one's partner. The focus is on the moment, and because of that, readers are immediately digging for clues about what happened with Ben on the mountain and why they were there to begin with. Of course, one needn't give away the mystery so quickly, but it's fascinating for a ghost/dream version of the dead to ask the narrator what happened and she doesn't answer. Is she hiding it from ghost, or merely her own conscience? She's certainly doing a damn good job hiding it from the readers! So I guess I'd better keep reading to find out what happened. :) Let’s see what next month’s find will teach us, shall we? Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

    20 min
  6. You've Got Five Pages, Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman, to Tell Me You're Good

    29/08/2025

    You've Got Five Pages, Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman, to Tell Me You're Good

    Welcome back, my fellow creatives!Yup, I'm back to looking at the first five pages of various stories, for those five pages can make or break the engagement of a reader--or an agent. So, let's scope out the stories of others to see how they hook an audience! This series was originally published independently, and grew such a following it's now got a traditional publishing deal. Good for Dinniman, I say, because these first five pages are bang-on. Heck, I spent the first half of my podcast dissecting the first page. The first few sentences alone share a lot of information. "The Transformation occurred at approximately 2:23 A.M., Pacific Standard Time. As far as I could tell, anyone who was indoors when it happened died instantly. If you had any sort of roof over you, you were dead. That included people in cars, airplanes, subways. Even tents and cardboard boxes. Hell, probably umbrellas, too. Though I'm not so sure about that one."We don't know what The Transformation is, but the scope of death alluded to by the narrator is shocking. We also have a sense of the narrator's sense of humor and unreliability with the extent of his examples but uncertainty if he's right. As readers, we have to go along with the narrator, and as the paragraphs progress, we don't mind. The narrator is a principled guy who won't let his ex-girlfriend's cat die, and because of that he's alive when The Transformation happens. By the end of five pages you learn a lot about the protagonist Carl, his skill set, his relationship with Princess Donut the cat, and what The Transformation looked like through his eyes. And if that's just the first five pages, I can't wait to see what the next hundred have to share. Let’s see what next month’s find will teach us, shall we? Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

    19 min

  7. 26/07/2025

    You've Got Five Pages, Our Last Resort by Clémence Michallon, to Tell Me You're Good.

    Welcome back, my fellow creatives!Yup, I'm back to looking at the first five pages of various stories, for those five pages can make or break the engagement of a reader--or an agent. So, let's scope out the stories of others to see how they hook an audience! I have a feeling I’m going against the flow with this one. Our Last Resort by Clémence Michallon has an enticing premise: the protagonist Frida and her brother are visiting a secluded desert resort in Utah. According to the book’s blurb, they had escaped a cult together fifteen years ago, and soon her brother will be the prime suspect in a series of murders. What could possibly go wrong with such a premise?! For the record, I’ve nothing against the premise. The sibling relationship is effectively portrayed in the first chapter before the brother’s even had a chance to speak. There is also a brief flashback to Frida’s childhood, alluding to the violence inflicted on children who try to seek help from the outside. All this is masterfully done by Michallon. However, the opening chapter focuses on Frida sneaking out of her suite to eavesdrop on a couple by the pool: a tabloid publisher and his hot young wife. Why did Frida sneak out to look at them? There is no clear motivation. She heard the couple and decided to go listen to them. That’s it. The first page had us learning about Frida's frantic triple-checking of her apartment every night, but at this hotel, she's totally cool leaving at random to listen to people. Another couple of pages in the publisher threatens violence to his wife, which causes Frida to remember her child abuse, and THAT could have made for good motivation, but before it’s just talking. And in this tense moment of hiding and possible violence, Frida starts describing the resort’s landscaping. It’s an odd mix to me, and I can’t wrap my head around what Michallon’s aiming for here. Perhaps some quirky juxtaposition, perhaps some intentional delaying of relaying action to build tension, I don’t know. But as a writer, this structure doesn’t seem to fit. Writers may be able to play around with character motivation and structure a bit more after the story’s established itself, but in the first chapter, it is CRUCIAL readers see motivation and action sync up. And I just don’t see them syncing up here. I’ll see what other stories await in the library next month. Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

    22 min
  8. You've Got Five Pages, Splinter Effect by Andrew Ludington, to Tell Me You're Good.

    27/06/2025

    You've Got Five Pages, Splinter Effect by Andrew Ludington, to Tell Me You're Good.

    Welcome back, my fellow creatives! Yup, I'm back to looking at the first five pages of various stories, for those five pages can make or break the engagement of a reader--or an agent. So, let's scope out the stories of others to see how they hook an audience! With my twins Biff and Bash up to their eyeballs in Dr. Who comics, books, and films, I couldn't help but pick a time-traveling story this month. After all, I grew up with the adventurers and time travelers; we even traveled through time ourselves to catch criminals like Carmen Sandiego!And it sounds like Ludington's protagonist Rabbit Ward has his own Carmen Sandiego to contend with. See, Rabbit Ward is an archaeologist who also travels back in time. He doesn't bring artifacts back with him, but he does try to ensure artifacts will be where present-day excavators can find them. It's a fun premise that promises plenty of misadventure, especially if there are competing time-travelers to contend with. That's an interesting twist Ludington shares on the second page of the novel: time machines are expensive, but not unique. This means different owners of those time machines may have their own motives for traveling through time...and chances are they are not all out to preserve antiquities like Rabbit Ward.Ludington's prose establishes the pacing of the story from the get-go with Rabbit Ward "crashing" back into the present, and that momentum never drops. Ludington takes care that the prose never slows that momentum, whether he's describing the time machine or sharing a flashback of Rabbit Ward in ancient Rome. If you've gotta go back in time, then Splinter Effect may be just the trip you need to double-back again.And what will we discover in the following story's pages? We'll have to wait and see. xxxx Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

    18 min
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Formerly Story Cuppings! Every month we visit the local library to randomly select a new release and read its first chapter. As writers, we are told that those opening pages are crucial to hooking readers. So, let's see if the first chapter successfully hooks picky readers as well as teaches fellow hardworking writers. Cheers!

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