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:
“I dream sometimes about a house I’ve never seen.
I mean, pretty much nobody has. Logan Caldwell claims he ding-dong-ditched the place last summer break, but he’s an even bigger liar than me. The truth is you can’t really see the house from the road. Just the iron teeth of the front gate and the long red lick of the drive, maybe a glimpse of limestone walls crosshatched by honeysuckle and greenbriers.”
Do you recognise the book these first lines come from?
*drumroll please!*
Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
A grim and gothic new tale from author Alix E. Harrow about a small town haunted by secrets that can’t stay buried and the sinister house that sits at the crossroads of it all.
Eden, Kentucky, is just another dying, bad-luck town, known only for the legend of E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth-century author and illustrator who wrote The Underland–and disappeared.
📖 KEEP READING…
Before she vanished, Starling House appeared. But everyone agrees that it’s best to let the uncanny house―and its last lonely heir, Arthur Starling―go to rot.
Opal knows better than to mess with haunted houses or brooding men, but an unexpected job offer might be a chance to get her brother out of Eden. Too quickly, though, Starling House starts to feel dangerously like something she’s never had: a home.
As sinister forces converge on Starling House, Opal and Arthur are going to have to make a dire choice to dig up the buried secrets of the past and confront their own fears, or let Eden be taken over by literal nightmares.
If Opal wants a home, she’ll have to fight for it.
Have you read Starling House or is it on your TBR?
dinipandareads 
I’ve read this one but didn’t remember that first line at all! 🤦🏻♀️
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Did you enjoy it? I surprisingly can’t recall many blogger reviews on this!
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I liked the creepy house factor of it so I gave it 3.5 stars but it was slow in the beginning and the ending kind of wasn’t believable enough for me haha but overall it was okay.
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I usually don’t know the answers to these because 9x out of 10 I haven’t read the book but I got excited that I recognized this one!!
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The excitement of recognizing a line in a FLF post never gets old! 🤣
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[…] #FirstLinesFriday: 25 October 2024 […]
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