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 dream sometimes about a house I’ve never seen .”
Do you recognize the lines?
Here’s a hint:
It’s a fantasy – romance.
Still not sure? Here’s another hint:
It’s written by Alex E. Harrow.
The First Lines Friday book is:
Starling House
Title: Starling House
Author: Alix E. Harrow
Pub. Date: Oct. 3, 2023
Page Length: 320
Publisher: Tor Books
Synopsis: 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. 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.
LINKS: Goodreads | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Have you read Starling House? What do you think of the first line? Comment below,
Fun post. Thanks for sharing.
Great line! I read this book but didn’t remember that line, maybe because I read the arc last year? I enjoyed it though.