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 Line:

He knew from the first that this man would know how to hurt him.

Interested? Scroll down for the cover and summary!

The Tale of Oriel by Cynthia Voigt

The prospect of freedom is weighted with danger in this tale of high adventure, the third book in the Tales of the Kingdom series from Newbery Medalist Cynthia Voigt.

Oriel has always stood out as someone who would not bend. No matter how much he has had to endure, the Damall’s cruelty cannot corrupt him. Griff, a boy who has watched and admired Oriel, is the opposite. He has learned to keep out of sight, to bow in the face of force. Yet the two became friends, and together they escaped from the terrors of the island and take with them the Damall’s most prized relic—the beryl, a green gemstone engraved with a falcon, its wings unfolding. But as they seek a new life, it’s not as easy as they’d hoped, for ahead lie raiding Wolfers, rival armies, and unspeakable dangers…

Previously published as The Wings of a Falcon, this classic tale features a new look and a new title.

This is a reread, but I haven’t read it since high school so it doesn’t feel like one. It’s different from the others in the series in that the main character is a boy. He also thinks in a different way than the girls from the other three books. I really enjoy the way he thinks things out, simplistic but insightful, obviously young, but not at all stupid. Oriel is constantly thinking out how to make his life, and Griff’s better, how to secure their freedom and safety in any situation. And as with all the Kingdom novels, I love finding the references to things from the previous novels.

The Tales of the Kingdom books are a loosely-connected series of non-magical middle-grade fantasy.