So
I finally got back to this.
The prologue is... stuffed.
Core idea and narrative aren't bad at all, but, for lack of a better way to put it, your writing style is kind of overdressed.
Especially the first 30% seem to have additional sentence structures where ever grammatically possible.
If this wasn't for the sake of a review, I would probably have stopped right there.
After this initial drag you get into relevant exposition with her family. If the rest of the chapter was like this, you'd have had me.
But it wasn't. The news segment is another source of clutter with basically only one thing I deemed important enough to remember: There's terrorists with a somewhat just cause.
As for the rest, Sam put it pretty accurately:
Sam turned off the feed. “That’s enough, tired of hearing all that bullshit.”
Then there's the first chapter proper.
There's a lot less info dump, so that's a plus.
But the entire thing seems to consist of transition scenes.
The actually important bits are only referenced in dialogue.
In the prologue she prepared for the recruitment meeting(?)
Then she's getting drunk after a failed exam leading to a talk with her parents.
Then she's finishing off her enlistment.
With none of the mentioned events having been shown.
Building tension with leaving out key scenes for the moment is a valid narrative device, but there's a point it turns into "What am I even reading this for?"
You started the book with "How did she get there", so this on top before the latter is resolved is just... no.
To make it worse your paragraphs crawl with descriptions of mundane actions.
This might just be about the narrative style I'm used to, so take this with a grain of salt, but excess on scenes I'm already just reading to get to what they build up to kind of puts the nail in the coffin.
"I want my parents to let me live my life" and "I'm so happy I can finally live my dream" can't fill a 3k word chapter on their own.
So in conclusion (Yes, I am going to salt the wound)
I can see this improving, especially with the learning curve she seems like she's about to have.
But with those first two chapters I kind of doubt all too many will come far enough to witness it.
How you could improve:
Uhh, don't do what I complained about?
But seriously, exposition solely for the sake of something else is acceptable, so long as it's not more than it needs to.
Going forward, or maybe even in reworking your chapters, ask yourself whether you really need things to be that verbose in this particualr paragraph.
Punctual verbosity can make for great scenes, but more of it doesn't make for a better scene, especially if there's little actually happening.
On the other hand I might have got this all wrong. Wait for deeprot's feedback before you feel pressured into making any drastic changes
