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:
“There were tales that only the island knew. Ones that had never been told. I knew, because I was one of them.”

Do you recognise the book these first lines come from?







*drumroll please!*



Spells for Forgetting by Adrienne Young
A deeply atmospheric story about ancestral magic, an unsolved murder, and a second chance at true love.
Emery Blackwood’s life changed forever the night her best friend was found dead and the love of her life, August Salt, was accused of murdering her.
📖 SYNOPSIS
Years later, she is doing what her teenage self swore she never would: living a quiet existence on the misty, remote shores of Saoirse Island and running the family’s business, Blackwood’s Tea Shoppe Herbal Tonics & Tea Leaf Readings.
But when the island, rooted in folklore and magic, begins to show signs of strange happenings, Emery knows that something is coming. The morning she wakes to find that every single tree on Saoirse has turned color in a single night, August returns for the first time in fourteen years and unearths the past that the town has tried desperately to forget.
August knows he is not welcome on Saiorse, not after the night everything changed. As a fire raged on at the Salt family orchard, Lily Morgan was found dead in the dark woods, shaking the bedrock of their tight-knit community and branding August a murderer. When he returns to bury his mother’s ashes, he must confront the people who turned their backs on him and face the one wound from his past that has never healed—Emery.
The town has more than one reason to want August gone, and the emergence of deep betrayals and hidden promises spanning generations threaten to reveal the truth behind Lily’s mysterious death once and for all.

Have you read Spells for Forgetting or is it on your TBR?

I still need to read this one!
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Oh, that is a good first line!
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I always get so excited when I guess these! lol I really enjoyed this one!
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Oh this is such a brilliant first line, I really need to pick this one up 😀
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I was right! I have read it and it was fine. 😅 I think my opinion was unpopular.
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[…] #FirstLinesFriday: 19 May 2023 […]
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Great first line. I put this one on my TBR because I enjoyed the Fable series, but haven’t gotten to it yet.
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