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!

First Lines:

At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin. I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt the longing build in my chest. The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam.

Did the quote pique your interest? View this book on Goodreads!

This book managed to simultaneously creep me out more than I expected and less than I expected. Either way it was good and I recommend it.

My Posts About Coraline

Searching for Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede
(Enchanted Forest Chronicles, book 2)
Rating:  ★★★★☆ – really liked it
Review:  No
Format:  eBook
Reading Dates:  August 1 – 17
Read Count:  1
Favorite Thing:  Cimorene does not have time for your nonsense.
Least Favorite Thing:  Telemain is actually pretty annoying?

Man this series is great! I already got book 3 from the library because I have to know what happens next. If you haven’t read these books yet, get on that ASAP!

My Posts About Searching for Dragons

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Ratings:  ★★★★☆ – really liked it
Review:  Yes
Format:  Print
Reading Dates:  August 20
Read Count:  1
Favorite Thing:  I really like the cadence of their speech in this book.
Least Favorite Thing:  Nobody knocked T. Ray out… Disappointing.

I was worried I’d be disappointed in this book, but I really wasn’t. The writing style really suited me and the subject matter was a good combination of light and heavy.

My Posts About The Secret Life of Bees

The Safe Keeper’s Secret by Sharon Shinn
(Safe-Keepers, book 1)
Rating:  ★★★★☆ – really liked it
Review:  No
Format:  Print
Reading Dates:  August 21 – 24
Read Count:  1
Favorite Thing:  The Truth-Teller
Least Favorite Thing:  The romance-ish thing…

I read this book because I had read the second book in the series a long time ago without realizing it was part of a series at all. I remember liking it so I figure it’s time to go through the series. Especially since these books are on my list of books I own, but never managed to read!

My Posts About The Safe-Keeper’s Secret

The Truth-Teller’s Tale by Sharon Shinn
(Safe-Keepers, book 2)
Rating:  ★★★☆☆ – liked it
Review:  No
Format:  Print
Reading Dates:  August 25 – 31
Read Count:  2
Favorite Thing:  Roelynn, I think.
Least Favorite Thing:  All the damn secrets intentionally kept from the protag by people who said they cared for her and she’s just supposed to be fine with it…?

I remembered some of this, but not much, mostly I remembered thinking it was a cute story and it was. I preferred the first book though I think.

My Posts About The Truth-Teller’s Tale

In Progress

Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.

– Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees, page 285

Version:
Paperback, 336 pages
Published January 28th 2003 by Penguin Books

Knowing can be a curse on a person’s life. I’d traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn’t know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can’t ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.

– Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees, page 255-256

Version:
Paperback, 336 pages
Published January 28th 2003 by Penguin Books

You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind. From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac.

– Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees, page 249

Version:
Paperback, 336 pages
Published January 28th 2003 by Penguin Books

Probably one or two moments in your whole life you will hear a dark whispering spirit, a voice coming from the center of things. It will have blades for lips and will not stop until it speaks the one secret thing at the heart of it all.

– Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees, page 242

Version:
Paperback, 336 pages
Published January 28th 2003 by Penguin Books

I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache, wondering what it was that connected us. Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?

– Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees, page 184

Version:
Paperback, 336 pages
Published January 28th 2003 by Penguin Books

Looking at her eyes, I could see a fire inside them. It was a hearth fire you could depend on, you could draw up to and get warm by if you were cold or cook something on that would feed the emptiness in you.

– Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees, page 181

Version:
Paperback, 336 pages
Published January 28th 2003 by Penguin Books

The first week at August’s was a consolation, a pure relief. The world will give you that once in a while, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.

– Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees, page 82

Version:
Paperback, 336 pages
Published January 28th 2003 by Penguin Books

When I looked up through the web of trees, the night fell over me, and for a moment I lost my boundaries, feeling like the sky was my own skin and the moon was my heart beating up there in the dark.

– Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees, page 23

Version:
Paperback, 336 pages
Published January 28th 2003 by Penguin Books