Silver Elite: Chapter 5

[penwalla]

We open to Wren locked up in a windowless interrogation room. She, understandably, doesn't like it.

There are no windows in this room. I hate windowless rooms. I’m not claustrophobic, not really. The walls aren’t closing in on me. I can breathe perfectly fine. It’s just this stifling feeling of being trapped like cattle in a pen. No escape routes, no weapons. I can’t stand it. It itches my skin and makes me feel like I’ve got those yellow ants from the Blacklands crawling all over me.

This is one of those paragraphs where it's like...at first glance it seems fine. I think it's too much, personally. First she's not claustrophobic, then she immediately describes the feeling of being claustrophobic. We really only needed one third of this--pick a simile and keep moving. We don't need to keep lingering on Wren having a bad time. She's been having a bad time since the book started.

Anyways, when Wren's interrogators show up, surprise! It's the hot violent guy from chapter one, and Wren makes sure to tell us he's gorgeous. Because that's so important. In this moment where Wren has been taken prisoner after accidentally killing her only family.

And he’s just as attractive as I remember, taking up all the air in the room with his broad frame and stunning face. It irritates me.

This is a genre convention I hate. Your heroine does not need to notice how hot the love interest is every single time he appears! If you develop a good romance, I promise you, the readers will follow along, you don't need to beat us over the head with how hot he is. It makes your heroines look deranged! Lock in, Wren, your uncle is dead and you may be next!

They interrogate Wren, who plays dumb, pretending she has no idea who her uncle really was and that she's just a random orphan he adopted. While Wren is being relentlessly questioned about her life, in a situation where slipping up will kill her at best, in a situation where her slip-ups have already DIRECTLY killed someone she loves...

She has to pause and tell us that she admires hot violent guy, who is standing at the back of the room silently the entire time.

Wren is confident that if she just keeps playing dumb, she'll be let go.

Let me show you another excerpt and then I'm going to have a complaint.

“I don’t believe you,” I say stubbornly, while inside I’m beyond grateful they can’t find fault in my own file. Children aren’t printed and logged in the Continental ID system until the age of twelve, which means these people will never know who I was before I entered the database. As far as they’re concerned, I’ve always been Wren Darlington.

This so-called dystopia needs more teeth.

Wren's confidence that if they can't find something wrong with her story, they'll have to let her go feels...wildly misplaced. This is supposed to be a military-run surveillance state, right? And Wren's been in hiding her whole like and is actively part of a rebel movement? And she was raised by a paranoid man on the run? So why does she have this confidence that she'll be released back to her ward eventually? Why isn't she worried that she's about to be disappeared into a labor camp somewhere, or executed unjustly, or something?

Like, it feels out of touch. Francis keeps pulling her punches when it comes to the injustice and unfairness of the world, which diminishes the threat she's trying to create in the Command.

Anyways, the two soldiers interrogating Wren step out, leaving Wren alone with hot violent guy. Chapter end.

God, I have low hopes about how the next chapter is going to go.