Etta

~ First Lines Friday – #6 (July 9, 2021) ~

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!


“Jessica Davis used to think it was an honest-to-God tragedy that only twenty-six percent of women believed in true love. Of course, that was nearly a decade ago, when she couldn’t imagine what it felt like to be anything but deeply and passionately obsessed with the man who would one day be her ex. Tonight, though, on her third first date in seven years, she was astounded the number was even that high.”


Do you recognize the lines?

Hint: This is a new release standalone contemporary romance published in May 2021.


Hint 2: It is written by two authors who publish under a single pen name.

This week’s book is:

The Soulmate Equation by Christina Lauren!

Published May 18th 2021, 368 pages

Single mom Jess Davis is a data and statistics wizard, but no amount of number crunching can convince her to step back into the dating world. Raised by her grandparents–who now help raise her seven-year-old daughter, Juno–Jess has been left behind too often to feel comfortable letting anyone in. After all, her father’s never been around, her hard-partying mother disappeared when she was six, and her ex decided he wasn’t “father material” before Juno was even born. Jess holds her loved ones close, but working constantly to stay afloat is hard…and lonely.

But then Jess hears about GeneticAlly, a buzzy new DNA-based matchmaking company that’s predicted to change dating forever. Finding a soulmate through DNA? The reliability of numbers: This Jess understands. At least she thought she did, until her test shows an unheard-of 98% compatibility with another subject in the database: GeneticAlly’s founder, Dr. River Pena. This is one number she can’t wrap her head around, because she already knows Dr. Pena. The stuck-up, stubborn man is without a doubt not her soulmate. But GeneticAlly has a proposition: Get to know him and we’ll pay you. Jess–who is barely making ends meet–is in no position to turn it down, despite her skepticism about the project and her dislike for River. As the pair are dragged from one event to the next as the “Diamond” pairing that could make GeneticAlly a mint in stock prices, Jess begins to realize that there might be more to the scientist–and the science behind a soulmate–than she thought.


Although there are still many Christina Lauren novels on my TBR list, I have enjoyed those that I previously read. This one still sounds very interesting to me and I have it on my short-list for my July reads. I have it on both audiobook and ebook, so I am not sure which one I will try, but I really want to try and fit this novel in sometime soon.


  • Have you read The Soulmate Equation or is it on your TBR?
  • What did you think of the first lines?

2 thoughts on “~ First Lines Friday – #6 (July 9, 2021) ~

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