Hello beautiful humans! How are y’all doing today? Me, I’m doing great. A little behind on my reading, unfortunately. My currently reading stack sits at four and my completed reads stack sits at zero. This is bad because it’s the 12th and I feel like I’ve barely gotten started on the month.

I blame Animal Crossing and TikTok.

I’ll do better, I think.

On to First Lines Friday!

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!

The Lines:

“Sarah Huff needed a gun. A gun of her own. She wouldn’t tell her mom about it. She wouldn’t tell Anna about it. If they knew she had a gun, they would just freak out and make the whole situation worse. She went to a strung-out 22-year-old named Bryce, who loitered around the same abandoned corner in the free zones of Rockville every day, selling black market shit to anyone who needed it.”

Intruiged?

Point B by Drew Magary

When the corporate monolith PortSys brought porting to the masses, CEO Emilia Kirsch and her son Jason accomplished what every other startup company had failed to deliver. They really did change the world. They reversed climate change. They created a multitrillion-dollar industry out of thin air, curing economic woes across the globe. They made it so that anyone could be anywhere simply by touching a screen…

…including the man who murdered Sarah Huff.

Now Sarah’s 17–year-old sister, Anna, is determined to hunt the bastard down. But there are a few problems. She doesn’t know who the killer is, or where in the world he may be at any given moment. Also, she’s stuck at prestigious Druskin Academy, where PortPhones are banned and any student who attempts to port off-campus is immediately expelled.

It gets stickier. Anna’s also fallen in love with her dazzling new roommate, who just so happens to be Emilia Kirsch’s daughter, Lara. The dean of students wants Anna dead, perhaps literally. And she has only two friends to confide in: one a reckless alcoholic and the other a bizarre fussbudget. Oh, and now she also needs to find Lara, who has mysteriously disappeared from campus.

I read The Postmortal by this author and gave it 4 stars. But I also read The Hike and DNF’d it. So this book sits kinda middle ground on my TBR pile, which is terrible, because it means I don’t want to get to it anytime soon, but I still want to read it. The burdens we bear as book readers. Do you have a book you’re worried that will disappoint you?