
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:
Sleeping Beauty is pretty much the worst fairy tale, any way you slice it. It’s aimless and amoral and chauvinist as shit.
Do you recognize the lines?

Hint: It’s a new YA fantasy.

Still not sure? Here’s another hint:
It’s a Rumpelstiltskin retelling.

The First Lines Friday book is:
A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow
About the Book:

Series: Fractured Fables #1
Page Length: 128
Publisher: Tor
Synopsis: It’s Zinnia Gray’s twenty-first birthday, which is extra-special because it’s the last birthday she’ll ever have. When she was young, an industrial accident left Zinnia with a rare condition. Not much is known about her illness, just that no one has lived past twenty-one.
Her best friend Charm is intent on making Zinnia’s last birthday special with a full sleeping beauty experience, complete with a tower and a spinning wheel. But when Zinnia pricks her finger, something strange and unexpected happens, and she finds herself falling through worlds, with another sleeping beauty, just as desperate to escape her fate.
I bought a copy of A Spindle Splintered this week when I went to the Barnes & Noble 50% off sale this week. Have you read the book? What do you think of the first lines?
The cover is really nice!
HI