First Lines Fridays

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!

My name is Stina and I’m probably going to die soon. No one has told me so, but I’m no fool. I see it in Mama’s eyes. I hear the neighbourhood women murmur and mutter. They tilt their heads and cluck their tongues when the see me. Tut-tut-tut.

Any ideas?

Goodreads Synopsis:

The grown-ups all think she’s going to die soon-she can see it in their eyes. Still, when poor twelve-year-old Stina is sent to remote Raspberry Hill Sanatorium she can’t believe her luck. She gets to ride in a real motor car to the hospital, which looks like a magnificent castle hidden deep in the forest.

But as Stina explores the long, echoey corridors of her eerie new home, she begins to suspect that the building is concealing a dark secret. How did the old East Wing burn down? Why doesn’t her mother reply to any of her letters? And what are the nurses all so afraid of? Stina is determined to solve the mystery of Raspberry Hil­l-but as she edges closer to the truth, she finds herself in terrible danger…

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