First-Sentence Friday and Huge Honkin' YA Contest

Ah…..Friday. Such a nice word. Makes me want to clean out some bookshelves. So here’s the game. Match the first line with the book it’s from, post your answers in the comments. (Can you cheat? Sure!)

Authors agonize over first lines. Well, first paragraphs, first scenes, middle scenes, last scenes...we agonize over everything. But especially that opening line. It should make us readers want to keep reading. So below are opening lines from seven YA novels. Some bestsellers, some that maybe should have been but weren't. Some new, a couple not so new.

Everyone who matches all the first sentences with the novel they come from will go into a drawing for ALL the books. But Suzanne, you might be saying, that’s SEVEN freaking books! Well, yes. Yes it is. And I’m not even going to make you tweet and follow and all that stuff, although if you want to do so it will be very much appreciated.

Just play the matching game for an entry. Note: If the book starts with a prologue, this is the first sentence from the first chapter, not the prologue.

FIRST SENTENCES:

A.    I was standing on top of the white water tower, with my back to the sun.

B.     We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.

C.    The man billed as Prospero the Enchanter receives a fair amount of correspondence via the theater office, but this is the first envelope addressed to him that contains a suicide note, and it is also the first to arrive carefully pinned to the coat of a five-year-old girl.

D.    I was just out of Arrivals and eyeballing the Remarkables above the Queenstown terminal roof when the PA system called my name.

E.     It isn’t working. (ha *Suzanne laughs maniacally*)

F.     “Well?” (Sigh. Okay, I’ll give you the second sentence as well.) I stepped out of the car and into the hot thick heat of August in Georgia.

G.    I wake up barefoot, standing on cold slate tiles.

BOOKS:

1.Bloodborn, by Karen Kincy

2. The Restoration Game, by Ken Macleod

3. White Cat, by Holly Black

4. Beautiful Chaos, by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

5. Hex Hall, by Rachel Hawkins

6. The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern

7. Feed, by M.T. Anderson

So, there’s your Friday task. See what you come up with, and put your answers in a comment. That’s all there is to it!