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:
“The frog was dead, there was no doubt about that. It had been dead already when Hazel Sinnett found it. She was taking her daily stroll after breakfast, and the frog had just been there, lying on the garden path, on its back as though it had been trying to sunbathe.”
Do you recognise the book these first lines come from?
*drumroll please!*
Anatomy: A Love Story by Dana Schwartz
Edinburgh, 1817. Hazel Sinnett is a lady who wants to be a surgeon more than she wants to marry.
Jack Currer is a resurrection man who’s just trying to survive in a city where it’s too easy to die.
📖 KEEP READING…
When the two of them have a chance encounter outside the Edinburgh Anatomist’s Society, Hazel thinks nothing of it at first. But after she gets kicked out of renowned surgeon Dr. Beecham’s lectures for being the wrong gender, she realizes that her new acquaintance might be more helpful than she first thought. Because Hazel has made a deal with Dr. Beecham: if she can pass the medical examination on her own, the university will allow her to enroll. Without official lessons, though, Hazel will need more than just her books – she’ll need bodies to study, corpses to dissect.
Lucky that she’s made the acquaintance of someone who digs them up for a living, then.
But Jack has his own problems: strange men have been seen skulking around cemeteries, his friends are disappearing off the streets. Hazel and Jack work together to uncover the secrets buried not just in unmarked graves, but in the very heart of Edinburgh society.
A gothic tale full of mystery and romance about a willful female surgeon, a resurrection man who sells bodies for a living, and the buried secrets they must uncover together.
Have you read Anatomy: A Love Story or is it on your TBR?
dinipandareads 
I should have known. I mean, I saw your previous post where you talk about reading this book but to be honest, I did not know much about its plot. I was confused when I saw the book started with the frog, but it kind of makes sense given what it is about.
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🤭 I also didn’t refresh my memory about the plot before picking this up last week. I was unsurprisingly surprised by how gruesome it gets haha 😂 And you’re right—the dead frog beginning definitely tracks with the rest of the book lol
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That is an odd opening.
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Indeed, it’s a bit of a curious book!
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I did not recognize the line because I have not read this yet but the line drew me in that’s for sure, I think I would like this book!
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If you enjoy a bit of the grotesque and well, I mean, reading about dead bodies and surgeries then I think you’d enjoy this 😂 I totally forgot what this was about when I picked it up last week cos it’s been on my TBR for years and didn’t read the synopsis before beginning. It was definitely not what I expected, haha
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Weirdly, I’ve recently read a few books that have women who do autopsies in Victorian times so this would fit that theme I think! haha that’s kind of hilarious though that could have potentially been scary if you weren’t emotionally prepared for it! Hope you weren’t too shocked lol.
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It wasn’t scary but I was more like “what did I just pick up now?” 😂 I don’t think I’ve read any Victorian era books where women want to be surgeons specifically, so this is interesting especially since it’s YA! It’s definitely perfect for the spooky season vibes though, that’s for sure.
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Ahaha okay good! phew 😂 I do enjoy sometimes that feeling of what the heck am I reading?! lol. Women in STEM but make it gothic!!😆
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[…] #FirstLinesFriday: 18 October 2024 […]
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