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:
“Stay calm. It’ll all be fine.
If there was one place Maggie Le did not want to be, it was pushing a wobbly shopping cart through the narrow aisles of Tasty Great, the primary supermarket in the town of Fool’s Falls, eastern Washington State, population five thousand.“

Do you recognise the book these first lines come from?







*drumroll please!*



Role Playing by Cathy Yardley
Maggie is an unapologetically grumpy forty-eight-year-old hermit. But when her college-aged son makes her a deal―he’ll be more social if she does the same―she can’t refuse. She joins a new online gaming guild led by a friendly healer named Otter. So that nobody gets the wrong idea, she calls herself Bogwitch.
📖 SYNOPSIS
Otter is Aiden, a fifty-year-old optimist using the guild as an emotional outlet from his family drama caring for his aging mother while his brother plays house with Aiden’s ex-fiancée.
Bogwitch and Otter become fast virtual friends, but there’s a catch. Bogwitch thinks Otter is a college student. Otter assumes Bogwitch is an octogenarian.
When they finally meet face to face―after a rocky, shocking start―the unlikely pair of sunshine and stormy personalities grow tentatively closer. But Maggie’s previous relationships have left her bitter, and Aiden’s got a complicated past of his own.
Everything’s easier online. Can they make it work in real life?

Have you read Role Playing or is it on your TBR?

I’ve been seeing this book all over. I’ve been tempted to read it.
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Have you read any of Yardley’s books? I still haven’t yet but her books always sound like something I’ll love. I hope you enjoy it if you read it!
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I haven’t!
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Not my guess as all…my brain went to Crying in H-Mart, which I haven’t yet read.
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I can totally see why you’d think that! I still haven’t read that one yet either but I can’t wait to read it 🙂
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I haven’t read this one, and it doesn’t seem like something I’d usually pick up but it looks pretty good!
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I haven’t read many romances with gamers or with older protagonists but I love the sound of that combo and I hope it’s as good as I’ve heard lol
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Yardly is an author I swear I am going to read. I think I own three books
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SAME, Sam!! Same!! I don’t know why I haven’t read her books yet tbh cos I feel like I’m going to love her romances!
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I’m going to be reading this book sometime this month.
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I’d be curious to know what you think! I hope you enjoy it 😃
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I hope I enjoy it. It’s definitely different to what I usually read because the characters are older but it sounds like it will be a good one.
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This is on my TBR> I’ve heard mixed reviews, but it sounds really good!
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Ooh, have you seen mixed things? I actually haven’t seen much but what I have seen has been very positive! I hope you enjoy it if you do pick it up 🙂
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This is the first time I have seen this book, and it does sound interesting. I like the first line for sure.
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I’ve been seeing this everywhere and I love the sound of this so much! I hope that I enjoy it as much as everyone else seems to 🙂
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[…] #FirstLinesFriday: 11 August 2023 […]
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I loved this book! I hope you like when you get a chance to read it.
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