Happy Friday book lovers! We’re back with another First Lines Friday, a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines? Here are the rules:
- Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
- Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
- Finally… reveal the book!
First lines:
“My house has chicken legs. Two or three times a year, without warning, it stands up in the middle of the night and walks away from where we’ve been living. It might walk a hundred miles or it might walk a thousand, but where it lands is always the same. A lonely, bleak place at the edge of civilization.”
Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?
*drumroll please!*
Marinka dreams of a normal life, where her house stays in one place long enough for her to make friends. But her house has chicken legs and moves on without warning. For Marinka’s grandmother is Baba Yaga, who guides spirits between this world and the next. Marinka longs to change her destiny and sets out to break free from her grandmother’s footsteps, but her house has other ideas…
I’m not a big middle grade reader but I knew I needed to get my hands on this book the minute I saw its cover. There’s something about MG covers that always manage to suck me in. Must be the illustrations! I can’t wait to read The House with Chicken Legs. It sounds like such a fantastical concept 🙂
Have you read The House with Chicken Legs or is it on your TBR?
dinipandareads 
Haven’t read the book, but guessed right 😊
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Yay! That’s the best feeling 😀 Haha
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I haven not heard of this book, but I absolutely love the cover!
-Thi
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It’s so great, right? It’s what caught my eye first and then I knew I had to read this book lol
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I do love that cover! Such an interesting start, too.
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Some of these MG covers are so great and make me want to immediately add them to my TBR 😂
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Such a weird, but cool sentence!
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Haha for a story that’s about a house with chicken legs, I think I should be expecting a lot more weird/cool while reading this! 😜
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Wow, that was intriguing! Haha, I haven’t heard of this book but those first lines really caught my attention!
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Haha it’s a pretty great start, right?! I’m hoping the rest of the book will be as great 😀
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Oh my goodness, that’s a first line that will grab your attention! LOL
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Haha it really did! I did a double take to make sure I read it right at first 🤣
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Haha, what a brilliant opening! Especially when you don’t know the title, it makes it even more amusing!
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Haha it’s so great, right? I hope the rest of the story is just as good too 😀
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I love the cover! This looks really interesting.
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The cover is my faaave and I immediately knew I wanted it in my life 🤣
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OMG!! I haven’t read this book yet, but I knew immediately the phrase would be from it! Lol
It’s very high on my TBR btw. 🙂
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YAAS! Same here! The minute I saw this cover I knew I had to read this book and then I read these first lines and it became a “definitely reading soon” mood 😂 I hope you enjoy it, Alex!
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I have this on my kindle 😊😊😊
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I had never heard of this book but what a fitting first line for that title! 😀
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I recognized this one because I’m also obsessed with this beautiful cover and I added it to my TBR some time ago. 😅💙
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