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!
“Father told me I’m broken.
He didn’t speak this disappointment when I answered his question. But he said it with narrowed eyes, the way he sucked on his already hollow cheeks, the way the left side of his lips twitched a little bit down, the movement almost hidden by his beard.
He taught me how to read a person’s thoughts on their face. And he knew that I knew how to read these signs. So between us, it was as though he had spoken out loud.
The question: Who was your closest childhood friend?
My answer: I don’t know.”
Do you recognize the lines?
Hint: This is the first novel in a young adult fantasy series.
Hint 2: The second novel in the series will be released this month and the final will be published in 2022.
This week’s book is:
The Bone Shard Daughter (The Drowning Empire #1) by Andrea Stewart!
The emperor’s reign has lasted for decades, his mastery of bone shard magic powering the animal-like constructs that maintain law and order. But now his rule is failing, and revolution is sweeping across the Empire’s many islands.
Lin is the emperor’s daughter and spends her days trapped in a palace of locked doors and dark secrets. When her father refuses to recognise her as heir to the throne, she vows to prove her worth by mastering the forbidden art of bone shard magic.
Yet such power carries a great cost, and when the revolution reaches the gates of the palace, Lin must decide how far she is willing to go to claim her birthright – and save her people.
I have the ARC for the second novel, The Bone Shard Emperor, that I hope to read soon. Since it is a continuous trilogy, I want to read the first novel before beginning the second. While I have seen the covers go around online a lot, I actually do not know a lot about the series. The synopsis sounds like a fun fantasy, so I hope both novels, and the eventual third, turn out well!
- Have you read The Bone Shard Daughter is it on your TBR?
- What did you think of the first lines?
chonkybooksreview.com 
I haven’t started reading the second book yet, but the first is so good! I thought the world and characters were so interesting and there’s the cutest creature companion ever. I hope you enjoy both when you get to them!
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