Well hello. Are you prepared for the upcoming Christmas chaos? Me neither! It’s always hectic. We have lots of nieces and nephews, and even though we don’t always get to see them all, we love and miss them all!

Don’t celebrate and are just looking forward to a day off of work? Awesome! I hope you have a nice, relaxing day.

But on this, the Friday before Christmas, I am thinking of 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:

“Her name is Melanie. It means “the black girl”, from an ancient Greek word, but her skin is so fair she thinks maybe it’s not such a good name for her. She likes the name Pandora a whole lot, but you don’t get to choose. Miss Justineau assigns names from a big list: new children get the top name on the boys’ list or the top name on the girls’ list, and that, Miss Justineau says, is that.?”

Intrigued?

The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey

Melanie is a very special girl. Dr. Caldwell calls her “our little genius.”
Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don’t like her. She jokes that she won’t bite, but they don’t laugh.

So I’m not going to lie. This has been on my TBR for a while. And, since I have had my realization that I don’t like dystopians, I am worried I won’t like it. But! I must go in with an optimistic mind! Otherwise, I will defeat myself before I have even started the book. But yeah, I’ve had this book for years. Years! And I haven’t picked it up. Maybe in the new year?