First Lines Friday #7

It’s time for another First Lines Friday! Hosted by Wandering Words!!

What if, instead of judging a book by its cover or its author, we judged the book by its opening lines?

Here is how it works:

– Pick a book and open to the first page.

– Copy the first few lines without revealing which book it is.

– Reveal the book!

So… do these first lines entice you?

The night Kate Harker decided to burn down the school chapel, she wasn’t angry or drunk. She was desperate.
Burning down the church was really a last resort; she’d already broken a girl’s nose, smoked in the dormitories, cheated on her first exam, and verbally harassed three of the nuns. But no matter what she did, St. Agnes Academy kept forgiving her. That was the problem with Catholic schools. They saw her as someone to be saved.
But Kate didn’t need salvation; she simply needed out.

Scroll down to reveal the book!

This Savage Song by V.E. Schwab

I’ll be honest, this wasn’t the start I expected to this book! I picked it up at a signing I went to because I’ve heard so many great things about her writing and about this book, but I was expecting a much more fantastical start! I’m not mad though, it’s definitely intrigued me and pushed the book up my tbr!

Eve of Man by Giovanna and Tom Fletcher| A Review

Eve of Man is a book I had barely heard about, which was kind of surprising. The authors are a married couple and Tom Fletcher is one of the member of McFly so I expected more promotion for this YA book! But thankfully for me my wonderful parents sent me a package down to uni whilst I was doing my postgrad in Portsmouth and they put this book in the box for me!

Sadly, if it wasn’t obvious, I didn’t end up reading the book for quite a while after they sent it to me. In face my MSc thesis was submitted over one year ago now (it was the 4th of October, I remember it well!) and I did that from my parents place so it’s definitely been a long time. But at least I finally got around to it! Now. Onto the book itself.

Eve is the only human female who has been born in the last 50(ish) years. All the other babies were male. And humanity freaked the hell out. When they found out that there was a girl in the womb organisations did all that they could to get her out into the world safe. And once she was born she was placed into a protective bubble, high up away from the rest of the population, and given an in depth education with the only interaction she had being from older women charged with looking after her, guards, and a virtual projection of a friend.

She’s supposed to be paired with a boy who has been selected for her. She gets a choice of three. With him they will restart the human race. But then Eve meets Bram, when she never should have, and now she doesn’t want to follow blindly anymore.

This book is a lot of fun. It is most definitely a stereotypical YA dystopian, it hits all of the beats and it does skip over some complications in order to make the story run smoothly. But I do have to say, despite this. Despite immediately gaining people’s trust, despite this being the highest security building on the planet, despite lots of little niggles that I found with this… It was so enjoyable!

I was totally sucked into this book, it was so fun, I adored the concept and also it ran at a pace which kept me inside of the story and really made me wanna keep reading. I now actually want to carry on with this series and I need to pick up The Eve Illusion which was published April of 2020. I’m looking forward to it!

Have you read this book? Have you even heard of it? Let me know!!