Happy Friday!!
First Line Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers (formerly) hosted by Wandering Words, but I saw it over at One Book More.
What if instead of judging a book by the cover, author or most everything else, we judged it by its content? Its first lines?
If you want to join in, all you gotta do is:
📚 Take a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open it 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!
Here are the first lines:
It was a harrowing climb to the high school. Eight hundred twenty-one steps.
Do you know the book? Here’s another hint or two if you don’t know what it is yet…
Still don’t know? Here’s some gorgeous pics of books to admire, whilst you consider…
Annnd the book is… 🥁🥁 The Sword of Kaigen by M.L. Wang!!
(Were you able to guess it?)
The Sword of Kaigen by M.L. Wang
SERIES: Theonite
LENGTH: 651 pages
GENRES: Fantasy, Fiction
PUBLISHER: Self Published
RELEASE DATE: 17 February 2019
BOOK DESCRIPTION:
Better to die sharp in war than rust through a time of peace.
A mother struggling to repress her violent past, a son struggling to grasp his violent future, a father blind to the danger that threatens them all.
When the winds of war reach their peninsula, will the Matsuda family have the strength to defend their empire? Or will they tear each other apart before the true enemies even reach their shores?
High on a mountainside at the edge of the Kaigenese Empire live the most powerful warriors in the world, superhumans capable of raising the sea and wielding blades of ice. For hundreds of years, the fighters of the Kusanagi Peninsula have held the Empire’s enemies at bay, earning their frozen spit of land the name ‘The Sword of Kaigen.’
Born into Kusanagi’s legendary Matsuda family, fourteen-year-old Mamoru has always known his purpose: to master his family’s fighting techniques and defend his homeland. But when an outsider arrives and pulls back the curtain on Kaigen’s alleged age of peace, Mamoru realizes that he might not have much time to become the fighter he was bred to be. Worse, the empire he was bred to defend may stand on a foundation of lies.
Misaki told herself that she left the passions of her youth behind when she married into the Matsuda house. Determined to be a good housewife and mother, she hid away her sword, along with everything from her days as a fighter in a faraway country. But with her growing son asking questions about the outside world, the threat of an impending invasion looming across the sea, and her frigid husband grating on her nerves, Misaki finds the fighter in her clawing its way back to the surface.
What books have you been reading lately? What’s on your TBR that you’re currently the most excited about?
As always, thank you for reading, and I hope you have an amazing day/night!
See ya ~Mar