First Lines Friday: January 3, 2025

First Lines Friday

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:

“With rope tied under one pillow and a tiny blade hidden beneath another, Vaasalisa Kozár scurried around a dimly lit room in the High Temple of Mireh.”


Do you recognize the lines?

Here’s a hint:

 It’s a new romantasy!

Still not sure? Here’s another hint: 

It’s written by Rebecca Robinson.


The First Lines Friday book is:

The Serpent and the Wolf


About the Book

Title: The Serpent and the Wolf

Author: Rebecca Robinson

Page Length: 352

Publication Date: Nov. 19, 2024

Publisher: Saga Press

Synopsis: All her life, Vaasa Kozár has been sharpened into a blade.

After losing her mother—her only remaining parent—to a mysterious dark magic that has since awakened within her, Vaasa is certain death looms. So is her merciless brother, who aims to eliminate Vaasa as a threat to his crown. In one last political scheme, he marries her off to Reid of Mireh, a ruthless foreign ruler, in hopes that he can use her death as a rallying cry to finally invade Reid’s nation. All Vaasa has to do is die.

But she is desperate to live. Vaasa enters her new marriage with every intent to escape it, wielding the hard-won political prowess and combat abilities her late father instilled in her. But to her surprise, Reid offers her a deal: help him win the votes to rise in power, and she can walk free. In exchange, he will share his knowledge about the dark magic running through her veins—and help keep it at bay.

This proposal may be too good to refuse, yet Vaasa and Reid’s undeniable attraction threatens to break the rules of their arrangement. As her brother’s lethal machinations take form, everything is at stake: Vaasa must learn to trust her new husband, but how can she, especially when their perfect political marriage begins to feel like the real thing?

LINKS:   Goodreads   |    Amazon    |   Barnes & Noble

Have you read The Serpent and the Wolf? What do you think of the first lines? Comment below!

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