First Lines Friday 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:
“Of all the ways they tried to kill him on Base Lab 9, Brinx figured the closest HyperHelix might ever come to success was breakfast.”
A mutant boy questions the truth of his existence after crash-landing far from everything he knows in this fast-paced, action-packed middle grade sci-fi adventure perfect for fans of The Last Kids on Earth and Scott Reintgen.
Brinx wasn’t born. He was created.
As one of the gene-spliced, vat-grown experiments living on Base Lab 9, Brinx’s existence has always been focused on one surviving the tests forced on him by his creators, with the goal of one day reaching the Graduation Center. Brinx doesn’t know what awaits him there—and it’s not like anyone ever comes back to tell—but it must be better than Base Lab 9.
When Brinx narrowly survives his final test, he boards the armored transport vessel en route to the Center along with the other graduates, including his best friend, Jang—only to have the vessel downed by a meteor shower. Now Brinx, who’s stranded with a handful of other survivors, has to stay alive in an uncharted region of their planet that’s teeming with monstrous flora and fauna, all while trying to find Jang, who’s among the missing—or worse.
Erik Jon Slangerup is the author of MOLLY AND THE MACHINE, his debut middle-grade novel about a young girl up against a giant robot who kidnaps her brother, out June 7, 2022. The sequel, MOLLY AND THE MUTANTS, will follow in 2023. The books are part of a 1980s action adventure series set in the hills of southern Ohio.
Erik has also written several picture books, including the award-winning DIRT BOY. In 2017, he co-created STORYSNACKER, a read-aloud storytime app ranked “Top 5 Apps in the World for Family and Kids.” Erik Lives in Columbus, Ohio with his wife, children, and semi-neurotic wiener-beagle mix.
