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Hi @archer360 !

It does pull me in. I want to know what happened to the sister, why only the brother can calm her down, etc. and that pushes me forward. Do you plan to answer those questions in the future or leave them as they are? I know there are different schools of thought on this, so there is no right or wrong answer. I’m just curious.

I like the dialogue and the actions that show me that Colton’s worried about his sister, the father seems emotionally remote, and the mother seems tense and stressed out. I think more of that could heighten my emotional attachment in the story. If I were you, I’d reread it a few times and ask myself how many of the internal thinking moments could be removed or replaced with an action or dialogue.

I definitely think you’re on a good track here as far as hooking the reader goes.

Two last things to consider:

1) I spotted some grammatical problems (don’t worry! I’ve seen it happen to some really experienced writer friends of mine, including a college instructor). Instead of pointing them out, I’ll pass along a couple of techniques I use. First, I read my work out loud. I catch most of my mistakes that way. It also helps keep my dialogue more believable. If I still have errors after that, I read my piece sentence by sentence in reverse sequence.

What genre is this story? From the prologue, I’m thinking it’s going to be a story about family and coming of age, like “To Kill a Mockingbird”.

Nice work Archer!