Book Hook: Five Fantastic First Lines

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There’s nothing like a fantastic opening line. They’re literary bait: a lure that, ideally, gives an idea of the story type/feeling while planting a tantalizing seed that makes the reader want to instantly dive in. Below are five first lines I love, and that I feel fit the bill.

 Five Fantastic First Lines💀

• It Will Just Be Us by Jo Kaplan: “In Wakefield Manor, a decaying ancestral mansion brooding on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia, there is a locked room.”

• The Last Tale of the Flower Bride by Roshani Chokshi: “You warned me that knowing your secret would destroy us.”

• The Unsuitable by Molly Pohlig: “you killed me, remember that.”

• The Quiet Stillness of Empty Houses by L. V. Russell: “Death was no stranger to Theodora Corvus.”

• The Pale Blue Eye by Louis Bayard: “In two or three hours . . . well, it’s hard to tell . . . in three hours, surely, or at the very outside, four hours . . . within four hours, let us say, I’ll be dead.”

What are some of your favorite first lines?

❤Amanda

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