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 child – if child it was – came naked out of the wild-ness. It came out of the sparse bleak marsh beside the village where few dared go and none came back.
Any ideas?
Goodreads Synopsis:
A desperate village. A child who emerges from the marshes. A falcon that helps her save them all.
When the child emerges from the wilderness, no one in the village knows what to do with her. She is odd – half-wild, without speech and seems to have an unnatural bond with animals – especially the falcon, who is always circling above her. The Wise-Woman takes her in, and names her Rhodd, but the rest of the villagers remain suspicious.
Over the years, as Rhodd grows, the village realises that the river, which is their connection to the wider world, is beginning to die, and eventually a dark sickness begins to spread. Soon, too soon, the villagers turn their suspicion on Rhodd and her falcon.
And so, Rhodd sets out to discover what – or who – is causing the river to dry up . . . to protect her mother, her falcon and herself…
Book Craic 