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!
Got it? Okay let’s go! Here is the quote…
“I’m going to try to start at the beginning, even though I know you won’t believe me.”
Do you know this one?
It is by a very prolific author…
She is a master at retellings…
Have you guessed?
Yes? No?
Give up?
Here it is!
The Twisted Ones
Summary:
When a young woman clears out her deceased grandmother’s home in rural North Carolina, she finds long-hidden secrets about a strange colony of beings in the woods.
When Mouse’s dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother’s house, she says yes. After all, how bad could it be?
Answer: pretty bad. Grandma was a hoarder, and her house is stuffed with useless rubbish. That would be horrific enough, but there’s more—Mouse stumbles across her step-grandfather’s journal, which at first seems to be filled with nonsensical rants…until Mouse encounters some of the terrifying things he described for herself.
Alone in the woods with her dog, Mouse finds herself face to face with a series of impossible terrors—because sometimes the things that go bump in the night are real, and they’re looking for you. And if she doesn’t face them head on, she might not survive to tell the tale.
This is not a retelling as far as I can tell, but it is based on some folklore. This one is also a bit of a horror story I think, so I probably should have read it last month, but I just found it on the library shelf last week and decided to give it a chance. Have any of you read this one? What did you think? Let me know in the comments.
Until Next Time…
Confessions of a Serial Reader 