Broken Dove: Chapter One
May. 12th, 2026 08:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penwallaBefore the chapter itself, we have a profile of Wren that I assume is some kind of military document. It's titled "Red Threat" which suggests it's like, an internal document detailing her as a person of interest due to her treasonous activities. But it's weirdly laid out and the included info doesn't make that much sense.
In general I don't know why this is included. It's not new information to the readers in any way. It's just flavor and not very interesting flavor at that.
Okay, chapter one.
We open to Wren thinking about her real name, which she discovered at the end of the last book via a convenient letter left by Uncle Jim. Now, the letter was left for her in their secret house in the super-dangerous Blacklands, so it's not clear to me how he intended for her to get it. Seems like a pretty unreliable way to get someone critical, sensitive info about their person.
Regardless. Wren makes a hackneyed simile to explain the feeling that I think is silly.
What? This isn't a thing that happens to most people. What would make sense is comparing it to an ill-fitting pair of clothes, or a piece of outgrown clothing.
Wren tells us that she must conceal the truth of her parentage at all costs.
Two things. One, why? Why does she assume that her parents being traitors would damn her somehow? Wren's parents died when she was a child, she was raised by a known Uprising agent. Where's the evidence that in the world she lives in the children are assumed to have inherited the sins of the parents in this way?
Two, Wren, how is anyone going to know? You yourself had no idea until Jim told you. This isn't common knowledge. We have received no evidence so far that anyone is looking for the lost daughter of the Tin Block Traitors. This is a made up problem that I assume Wren is telling us about because she's going to be persecuted about it later.
Anyways. Wren and Xavier are in helicopter Grayson is piloting, taking them to the Uprising secret base.
This is going to be an ongoing theme in this chapter, so I won't belabor it here, but this characterization of Wren makes no fucking sense and I am mad about it.
Wren is pissed at Grayson Blake because he was posing as Kaine Sutler, a Silver Elite cadet who she had a fling with and who faked his own death to steal a plane. Wren is pissed at him because she grieved him, dammit. She has 0 self-awareness about her also being an Uprising agent, or about the fact that there were two Uprising agents embedded in her Silver Elite class and Wren did not clock either of them.
Xavier is pissed because one of the soldiers Grayson killed was his friend, Tyler Struck.
No fucking shit, Wren. Obviously he was playing a part, the same way YOU were playing a part. It's just that he was actually good at it and didn't immediately abandon his principles to ride Cross's dick.
Grayson pilots them to the base, which is concealed inside a mountain. We learn about the people in the helicopter: a woman who is described as being guarded and who is cold to Wren, signaling that she is this book's female villain, because as we all know being mean to Wren is the only crime these books recognize. This woman is Grayson's copilot. I suspect that we will discover later she is in love with Grayson or his ex or whatever and that's why she hates Wren.
Like, Wren has no self-awareness during this section at all. She tells about how these Uprising operatives don't trust her or Xavier like that's not a completely reasonable stance to have. You brought an enemy soldier to their secret base! No shit they're pissed!
For some reason, Grayson tells Xavier the name of the base, even though no one should be saying shit in front of him. He should be unconscious, or blindfolded, so he can't give away any info if he escapes. What if he has a tracker on him to lead the military right to them? Shouldn't they check? Like, the idea that they just load him into their chopper and bring him along is crazy.
I mean, props to Wren figuring literally anything out considering how unbelievably dumb she has been this far. But also, no shit, we know they stole a plane and we know it's not here and presumably they have more than one helicopter if their base is located at a distance from Empire territory.
Is there some reason she couldn't use her actual fucking telepathy to convey this to him?
Can you use telepathy to talk to non-Mods? I don't actually know.
Wren and Grayson chat for a bit in the hanger. She discovers that he is a rare Mod without telepathy, though he has other abilities which he refuses to reveal to her. Grayson does tell her about the layout of the base as they walk, which again seems like bad opsec to me, but as we will see later in the chapter, these guys just accept Wren as one of their own without question even though she is so bad at her job and seems like she is not really invested in the Uprising the way they are.
We'll get back to Wren's "honor in war" nonsense later. Put a pin in it. For now, Wren is tormented by memories of inciting Jayde Valence, and she struggles to justify it to herself, despite all the harm Jayde had done and would have continued to do.
Grayson takes Wren to his quarters to shower and change. Wren links with Cross while she showers.
Now, this is the first time Cross has appeared in Wren's thoughts in the book. Does she ruminate on his courage for staying behind, her fear for his well-being? Nope! She is thinking about how how he is.
Okay, so Wren is talking to Cross. She immediately tells him that Kaine is alive and a Mod and an Uprising agent, but she holds back that he is Grayson Blake, because that would be too much. Which...girl, all of that was too much. And we still have not been told why Grayson Blake is like a known Uprising operative and a famed pilot. How'd his name get out there? Was he a pilot for the Empire military first? But then there's no way he could be a fucking undercover agent, right? Like his fame makes no sense, the Uprising operates in secrecy. I could buy Wren having his name because she was affiliated with the Uprising already, but it's presented like he's a known figure and I don't understand how that can be possible if he was also able to go undercover in the fucking Silver Elite training program.
They argue because Wren wants Cross with her and he says he needs to be with his mom and keep his brothers in check. It would have been great to get Cross's POV of that stuff in the prologue in his POV.
First off, earlier in this convo Cross says that Travis is sending all the Mods to labor camps. Which is what Cross was doing. So what is exactly is the moral difference between them? The book doesn't comment on this, which makes Wren's insistence that Cross is doing his best feel hollow as shit. What the hell is Cross actually doing? What evidence do we have that he is making any difference in the Mod-Prime war beyond rescuing his girlfriend? None! Cross isn't doing his best, he's not doing shit. Which could be a great conflict in their relationship now that Wren has defected. But alas.
Also, this same Uprising that Wren wants us to believe is just so bloodthirsty refraining from killing Xavier on sight and Grayson literally told him he would have a chance to plead his case. Later in this chapter Wren will plead for his life and will not immediately be shut down. We're supposed to see them mind-breaking the General as this unbelievable evil that makes them all morally grey but I actually think disabling the fascist dictator of your oppressive regime is like, fine. Where is the fucking evidence that they do morally ambiguous things?
No, seriously. For all the scaremongering about the Uprising Wren is doing, they took out the General with minimal casualties. They didn't even kill him. One of their high-ranked members had to come do that shit in person, at great personal risk. Wren herself said in the last book that they minimize civilian casualties.
Also, Cross would be a huge benefit to the Uprising if he defected. If they're ruthlessly pragmatic, that should be a point in favor of him defecting. Are they ruthless pragmatists or do they mindlessly hate Primes? Can the book please decide?
Wren promises not to tell the Uprising that Cross is a Mod. Then she breaks contact with him and gets dressed. The book makes sure to tell us that her breasts are bigger than Luisa's, the co-pilot who doesn't like Wren. God, I hate this book.
Grayson continues his unfunny banter, and Wren decides she can forgive him for not being dead. I would think this woman who lost her only family at the beginning of the last book, watched another Mod get shot in the head, and then lost her closest friend to anti-Mod prejudice would be happy that Kaine was alive.
Wren is taken to the war room to meet with the Authority, who run the Uprising. There are apparently six of them. I feel like I read this exact scene in Iron Flame when Violet met the leaders of the rebellion, but whatever.
The Authority consists of Adrienne...Grayson...a woman and a man we don't know...and Uncle Jim.
Chapter end.
Okay, let's go back to that pin about Wren's characterization here. This is the same fucking bullshit they pulled with Violet Sorrenson. For those of you who have not experienced the horrors, Violet is the daughter of a high ranking military official, both her siblings are elite dragon-riding members of the military, and she has lived at her country's dedicated war college with plans to join the military as a scribe her entire life. But she's still somehow opposed to killing. And she's not set up as opposed to killing from the jump, she just develops that trait suddenly because the author thinks that it's necessary for female leads to have moral qualms about killing.
Wren Darlington was raised by a paranoid ex-Uprising agent who trained her to be a crack shot. She has lived her entire life under a fascist regime that imprisons, tortures, and kills people like her. She kills an animal in the first chapter of the book without remorse. She explicitly tells us that she is perfectly suited to be in Silver Elite, an elite military unit.
Where did she develop this aversion to killing people? Where did she develop this aversion to incitement? How does she square those beliefs with her lifetime of involvement with the Uprising, with the violence she is seeing inflicted on her people around her?
Like it's not bad in a vacuum if Wren is afraid to incite or reluctant to kill, but it feels like a trait completely at odds with everything else we know about her. It feels like it should be a much bigger part of her personality, like it should have come up before she had to kill someone or incite someone. Where does someone who has always been a member of an oppressed class develop this idea of the "the honor of war"? What rules is she fucking talking about?
I've seen Silver Elite described as pro-fascist propaganda, and I'm still torn on how deliberate the propaganda in that book is, but this weird "both sides are bad" thing this book does where it will spend significant page time humanizing the fascist military but then fearmonger about how the rebels fighting to not be genocided by the government are bad because they, uh, killed two soldiers and disabled the dictator of the country spearheading the genocide...it's bad.
If you have nothing material to say about dystopia, you have no business writing a dystopian romance.
NAME: Wren DarlingtonLike, why is "rank" listed at the top like it's a mandatory section on the form? Presumably not every threat to the Empire is ex-military. Also weird that her age and distinguishing features are listed further down from her rank. Her rank is irrelevant. She defected from the fucking military for treason. To be honest, I also think listing her ward at the top is also weird, because it's also irrelevant at this point unless it's so that people know to look for her there, and it feels like just listing "Ward" at the top doesn't really imply that.
RANK: 1st Soldier
WARD: Z
STATUS: Aberrant
LAST KNOWN LOCATION: Sanctum Point
WANTED FOR:Treason, concealment Destruction of property
ADDITIONAL DETAILS:
YEAR OF BIRTH: 5 NE
AGE: 20
DISTINGUISHING FEATURES: Bloodmark, left thigh
CAUTION:
Suspect is a highly trained sniper. Former Silver Elite operative. Aberrant abilities unknown, but bloodmark presence indicates suspect is powerful. Proceed with great caution.
ACTION:
Kill on sight.
In general I don't know why this is included. It's not new information to the readers in any way. It's just flavor and not very interesting flavor at that.
Okay, chapter one.
We open to Wren thinking about her real name, which she discovered at the end of the last book via a convenient letter left by Uncle Jim. Now, the letter was left for her in their secret house in the super-dangerous Blacklands, so it's not clear to me how he intended for her to get it. Seems like a pretty unreliable way to get someone critical, sensitive info about their person.
Regardless. Wren makes a hackneyed simile to explain the feeling that I think is silly.
The name is completely unfamiliar to me. It feels wrong. Like a piece of clothing you don’t recognize but are told belongs to you. The size is right, it fits fine, but you still feel like you’re wearing someone else’s clothes.
What? This isn't a thing that happens to most people. What would make sense is comparing it to an ill-fitting pair of clothes, or a piece of outgrown clothing.
Wren tells us that she must conceal the truth of her parentage at all costs.
Two things. One, why? Why does she assume that her parents being traitors would damn her somehow? Wren's parents died when she was a child, she was raised by a known Uprising agent. Where's the evidence that in the world she lives in the children are assumed to have inherited the sins of the parents in this way?
Two, Wren, how is anyone going to know? You yourself had no idea until Jim told you. This isn't common knowledge. We have received no evidence so far that anyone is looking for the lost daughter of the Tin Block Traitors. This is a made up problem that I assume Wren is telling us about because she's going to be persecuted about it later.
Anyways. Wren and Xavier are in helicopter Grayson is piloting, taking them to the Uprising secret base.
Grayson asked me before I boarded this helicopter if I was ready for war. Until a few days ago, I thought I was. I’m here because I want to support the cause. Our cause. When I started working for the network to sabotage the Command, I spent months on that base hearing how Mods are spoken about, seeing the way we’re feared and despised.
We deserve a place in society, an equal one, and I’m willing to fight for it. I’m more than ready to work with the Uprising to make life better for Mods like me.
But…I don’t know if I could lead two people to their deaths the way Grayson did.
This is going to be an ongoing theme in this chapter, so I won't belabor it here, but this characterization of Wren makes no fucking sense and I am mad about it.
Wren is pissed at Grayson Blake because he was posing as Kaine Sutler, a Silver Elite cadet who she had a fling with and who faked his own death to steal a plane. Wren is pissed at him because she grieved him, dammit. She has 0 self-awareness about her also being an Uprising agent, or about the fact that there were two Uprising agents embedded in her Silver Elite class and Wren did not clock either of them.
Xavier is pissed because one of the soldiers Grayson killed was his friend, Tyler Struck.
It’s becoming clear he’s not the same guy I knew from the Program, always quick with a mischievous grin or flirty remark. He’s a deadly network operative who’s perfectly at ease with taking two lives. Maybe not by his own hand, but certainly with his actions.
No fucking shit, Wren. Obviously he was playing a part, the same way YOU were playing a part. It's just that he was actually good at it and didn't immediately abandon his principles to ride Cross's dick.
Except then he twists around in the pilot’s seat, lips quirked, and when our gazes lock, I glimpse that familiar sparkle in his green eyes. It’ll take some time adjusting to him being Grayson Blake, but I have to believe my friend Kaine is still in there somewhere.Why? Why do you have to believe that?
Grayson pilots them to the base, which is concealed inside a mountain. We learn about the people in the helicopter: a woman who is described as being guarded and who is cold to Wren, signaling that she is this book's female villain, because as we all know being mean to Wren is the only crime these books recognize. This woman is Grayson's copilot. I suspect that we will discover later she is in love with Grayson or his ex or whatever and that's why she hates Wren.
Like, Wren has no self-awareness during this section at all. She tells about how these Uprising operatives don't trust her or Xavier like that's not a completely reasonable stance to have. You brought an enemy soldier to their secret base! No shit they're pissed!
For some reason, Grayson tells Xavier the name of the base, even though no one should be saying shit in front of him. He should be unconscious, or blindfolded, so he can't give away any info if he escapes. What if he has a tracker on him to lead the military right to them? Shouldn't they check? Like, the idea that they just load him into their chopper and bring him along is crazy.
I examine my surroundings, expecting to find a whole fleet of planes, perhaps the B-8 bomber Grayson stole from the Command, but save for a few open-top vehicles, some motorcycles, and this helicopter, the hangar sits empty.
My gaze follows the short runway to the massive metal wall at the end of it. I note the keypads affixed on either side of it, the blinking red lights from cameras on the ceiling. I’d bet the main hangar is beyond that wall, and this one is used solely for takeoffs and landings.
I mean, props to Wren figuring literally anything out considering how unbelievably dumb she has been this far. But also, no shit, we know they stole a plane and we know it's not here and presumably they have more than one helicopter if their base is located at a distance from Empire territory.
“And I told you I don’t care,” Grayson replies. He rolls his eyes when Xavier takes an aggressive stance as if preparing to resist. “Don’t fight it, Ford. You’ll get your chance to defend yourself. For now, don’t make shit harder for yourself.”
My gaze finds Xavier’s, and an unspoken exchange passes between us. He might not be telepathic like I am, but my eyes are perfectly capable of transmitting my message, loud and clear.
We’ll regroup later and come up with a plan.
Is there some reason she couldn't use her actual fucking telepathy to convey this to him?
Can you use telepathy to talk to non-Mods? I don't actually know.
Wren and Grayson chat for a bit in the hanger. She discovers that he is a rare Mod without telepathy, though he has other abilities which he refuses to reveal to her. Grayson does tell her about the layout of the base as they walk, which again seems like bad opsec to me, but as we will see later in the chapter, these guys just accept Wren as one of their own without question even though she is so bad at her job and seems like she is not really invested in the Uprising the way they are.
His mention of the Coup is a depressing reminder that the Uprising has been in operation for twenty-five years now. Twenty-five years of fighting against a regime that wants us either dead or living as second-class citizens. General Redden’s Silver Jubilee was only days ago, the celebration marking a quarter century of his reign, and I was right there in the ballroom when that reign ended in crushing defeat as Adrienne corrupted the man’s brain. I stood there in pure disbelief while she reduced the General to a vegetative state in front of our very eyes.25 years is a miniscule amount of time, to be honest. Like that means the Uprising started five years before Wren was born. That means there are a lot of people in the Empire who remember the old days, who lived through them. The society depicted in these books does not really portray the recency of the upheaval at all.
At that reminder, I force Grayson to stop walking, curling my hand around his arm. “Did you know what Adrienne was going to do to General Redden at the Jubilee?”
“Yes.” His response is swift. Unapologetic.
“And you just let her do that? She fried his brain.”
“Can’t say I’m too shaken up about it. The man has killed tens of thousands of Mods. He was the enemy, and we’re fighting a war.”
I know he’s right, but…Shouldn’t there be rules to warfare? Honor in war?
We'll get back to Wren's "honor in war" nonsense later. Put a pin in it. For now, Wren is tormented by memories of inciting Jayde Valence, and she struggles to justify it to herself, despite all the harm Jayde had done and would have continued to do.
Grayson takes Wren to his quarters to shower and change. Wren links with Cross while she showers.
Now, this is the first time Cross has appeared in Wren's thoughts in the book. Does she ruminate on his courage for staying behind, her fear for his well-being? Nope! She is thinking about how how he is.
I picture his perfect face, those cobalt-blue eyes, the mocking dimple and wicked smile…I think about his tall, broad body and big, capable hands…and the charged, heated shiver that rolls up my spine has nothing to do with the hot water pounding against my flesh.
Okay, so Wren is talking to Cross. She immediately tells him that Kaine is alive and a Mod and an Uprising agent, but she holds back that he is Grayson Blake, because that would be too much. Which...girl, all of that was too much. And we still have not been told why Grayson Blake is like a known Uprising operative and a famed pilot. How'd his name get out there? Was he a pilot for the Empire military first? But then there's no way he could be a fucking undercover agent, right? Like his fame makes no sense, the Uprising operates in secrecy. I could buy Wren having his name because she was affiliated with the Uprising already, but it's presented like he's a known figure and I don't understand how that can be possible if he was also able to go undercover in the fucking Silver Elite training program.
They argue because Wren wants Cross with her and he says he needs to be with his mom and keep his brothers in check. It would have been great to get Cross's POV of that stuff in the prologue in his POV.
“Have you told them about me?”We need to have evidence for this shit. You can't just have the characters say it and expect us to accept it!
His question triggers a jolt of shock. “Of course not. I would never do that. But I think if they knew—”
“It would only piss them off more,” he finishes. “I wouldn’t just be the enemy. They’ll call me a traitor to my people. No better than Jayde Valence or any of the other loyalist Mods.”
“But you’re not a loyalist,” I object. “What, you’re supposed to single-handedly topple a regime that pervades every aspect of society? Just you? You’re doing what you can to change the system from within. To save the lives you can.”
“Wren,” he says, his voice gruff, “do you honestly believe your Uprising will view it that way? Because we both know they’ll just declare I’m not doing enough. And then…they’ll kill me,” he reiterates.
I don’t want him to be right, but I fear he is.
First off, earlier in this convo Cross says that Travis is sending all the Mods to labor camps. Which is what Cross was doing. So what is exactly is the moral difference between them? The book doesn't comment on this, which makes Wren's insistence that Cross is doing his best feel hollow as shit. What the hell is Cross actually doing? What evidence do we have that he is making any difference in the Mod-Prime war beyond rescuing his girlfriend? None! Cross isn't doing his best, he's not doing shit. Which could be a great conflict in their relationship now that Wren has defected. But alas.
Also, this same Uprising that Wren wants us to believe is just so bloodthirsty refraining from killing Xavier on sight and Grayson literally told him he would have a chance to plead his case. Later in this chapter Wren will plead for his life and will not immediately be shut down. We're supposed to see them mind-breaking the General as this unbelievable evil that makes them all morally grey but I actually think disabling the fascist dictator of your oppressive regime is like, fine. Where is the fucking evidence that they do morally ambiguous things?
No, seriously. For all the scaremongering about the Uprising Wren is doing, they took out the General with minimal casualties. They didn't even kill him. One of their high-ranked members had to come do that shit in person, at great personal risk. Wren herself said in the last book that they minimize civilian casualties.
Also, Cross would be a huge benefit to the Uprising if he defected. If they're ruthlessly pragmatic, that should be a point in favor of him defecting. Are they ruthless pragmatists or do they mindlessly hate Primes? Can the book please decide?
Wren promises not to tell the Uprising that Cross is a Mod. Then she breaks contact with him and gets dressed. The book makes sure to tell us that her breasts are bigger than Luisa's, the co-pilot who doesn't like Wren. God, I hate this book.
Grayson continues his unfunny banter, and Wren decides she can forgive him for not being dead. I would think this woman who lost her only family at the beginning of the last book, watched another Mod get shot in the head, and then lost her closest friend to anti-Mod prejudice would be happy that Kaine was alive.
Wren is taken to the war room to meet with the Authority, who run the Uprising. There are apparently six of them. I feel like I read this exact scene in Iron Flame when Violet met the leaders of the rebellion, but whatever.
The Authority consists of Adrienne...Grayson...a woman and a man we don't know...and Uncle Jim.
Chapter end.
Okay, let's go back to that pin about Wren's characterization here. This is the same fucking bullshit they pulled with Violet Sorrenson. For those of you who have not experienced the horrors, Violet is the daughter of a high ranking military official, both her siblings are elite dragon-riding members of the military, and she has lived at her country's dedicated war college with plans to join the military as a scribe her entire life. But she's still somehow opposed to killing. And she's not set up as opposed to killing from the jump, she just develops that trait suddenly because the author thinks that it's necessary for female leads to have moral qualms about killing.
Wren Darlington was raised by a paranoid ex-Uprising agent who trained her to be a crack shot. She has lived her entire life under a fascist regime that imprisons, tortures, and kills people like her. She kills an animal in the first chapter of the book without remorse. She explicitly tells us that she is perfectly suited to be in Silver Elite, an elite military unit.
Where did she develop this aversion to killing people? Where did she develop this aversion to incitement? How does she square those beliefs with her lifetime of involvement with the Uprising, with the violence she is seeing inflicted on her people around her?
Like it's not bad in a vacuum if Wren is afraid to incite or reluctant to kill, but it feels like a trait completely at odds with everything else we know about her. It feels like it should be a much bigger part of her personality, like it should have come up before she had to kill someone or incite someone. Where does someone who has always been a member of an oppressed class develop this idea of the "the honor of war"? What rules is she fucking talking about?
I've seen Silver Elite described as pro-fascist propaganda, and I'm still torn on how deliberate the propaganda in that book is, but this weird "both sides are bad" thing this book does where it will spend significant page time humanizing the fascist military but then fearmonger about how the rebels fighting to not be genocided by the government are bad because they, uh, killed two soldiers and disabled the dictator of the country spearheading the genocide...it's bad.
If you have nothing material to say about dystopia, you have no business writing a dystopian romance.
