
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!
We find the owl at the very edge of our woods the morning after the storm. Wind-blasted and wings flight-frozen and round eyes glassy. I touch its feathers lightly with my fingertip and I’m surprised because they still feel real even though the owl has slipped away somewhere else and Dad is already digging a hole for it in the rain-soaked earth.
Any ideas?




I’ve had this since it was first published and can’t believe I haven’t read it yet. I’m absolutely loving it!
Goodreads Synopsis:
October and her dad live in the woods. They sleep in the house Dad built for them and eat the food they grow in the vegetable patches. They know the trees and the rocks and the lake and stars like best friends. They read the books they buy in town again and again until the pages are soft and yellow – until next year’s town visit. They live in the woods and they are wild. And that’s the way it is. Until the year October turns eleven. That’s the year October rescues a baby owl. It’s the year Dad falls out of the biggest tree in their woods. The year the woman who calls herself October’s mother comes back. The year everything changes.
Without following the arrows down, this has got to be October, October by Katya Balen.
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It is! I knew this would be good as I’ve seen so many recommendations. It’s my backlist current read and I’m so glad I’ve picked it up.
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