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!

In the grounds of a ruined monastery, on the outskirts of Siena, a girl awoke in a charnel house.

All about her were skeletons: by the thin shafts of light flitting in from the slits in the ribcage shutters she could see the bed about her, built from tibias and fibulas. A moon-white skull still warm from last night’s fire was cupped over her feet, for here the nights were clear and cool.

Any ideas?

I’ve adored every book by Kiran Millwood Hargrave who writes for middle-grade, young adults and adults. I am so looking forward to reading this one – what an opening! I’ hoping to read it this week.

Have you read this? What did you think?