
First Lines Fridays is 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?
- 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’m gonna miss the Draft.
The Hadfield is disintegrating around me. Black arcs of quantum lightening are melting the ship’s hull to slag. My spacesuit is screaming seventeen different alarms, the lock on this damn cryogenic pod still won’t open, and that’s the one thought blaring in my head.
Do you recognize the lines?

Hint: It’s the first book in a YA sci-fi series.

Still not sure? Here’s another hint: The second book came out earlier this month.

The First Lines Friday book is:

Title: Aurora Rising
Authors: Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
Series: The Aurora Cycle
Publication Date: May 7, 2019
Book Length: 473 pages
Synopsis:
The year is 2380, and the graduating cadets of Aurora Academy are being assigned their first missions. Star pupil Tyler Jones is ready to recruit the squad of his dreams, but his own boneheaded heroism sees him stuck with the dregs nobody else in the Academy would touch…
A cocky diplomat with a black belt in sarcasm
A sociopath scientist with a fondness for shooting her bunkmates
A smart-ass techwiz with the galaxy’s biggest chip on his shoulder
An alien warrior with anger management issues
A tomboy pilot who’s totally not into him, in case you were wondering
And Ty’s squad isn’t even his biggest problem—that’d be Aurora Jie-Lin O’Malley, the girl he’s just rescued from interdimensional space. Trapped in cryo-sleep for two centuries, Auri is a girl out of time and out of her depth. But she could be the catalyst that starts a war millions of years in the making, and Tyler’s squad of losers, discipline-cases and misfits might just be the last hope for the entire galaxy.
They’re not the heroes we deserve. They’re just the ones we could find. Nobody panic.
It sound amazing, doesn’t it? Have you read Aurora Rising? What did you think? Comment below!
Yay! I love guessing first lines correctly 😍 Really loved this one!
Nice! 🙂 Glad you loved it ~I can’t wait to read it! 🙂