[599] Blackrange - Prologue

This is the short prologue to a fantasy romance manuscript about a woman named Alex who struggles with alcoholism and drug abuse following the death of her husband. A year into mourning, her best friend Vero asks her to use her magical power of Fluency to read from an old book she found, and in doing so she is transported to another world. The book in general is about how she heals from her loss and (in this draft at least) avenges her husband's death.

I didn't originally have a prologue, but I wanted the first page a reader sees to fit the stress-level of most of the rest of the book, and I thought this would work better in that regard than my first chapter.

Feedback: is it intriguing, or confusing, or just boring? When the narrator refers to Alex by name, is that something you can roll with for a few pages, or is it too jarring/raises too many questions too quickly? How convincingly bleak is her predicament?

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My critique:

[794] Prologue for Speculative Fiction WIP