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…
“Superheroes are built out of lies from head to foot, carved and curated moral products that inarguably do more harm than good. (I should know this because I have counted it, calculated it down to the lifeyear, and found the weight of their goodness wanting in comparison.)”
Do you know this one?
It is the second book in a series…
It came out last week…
Have you guessed?
Yes? No?
Give up?
Here it is!
Villain by Natalie Zina Walschots
Summary from Goodreads:
Anna, better known to superheroes as the Auditor, has carved out a name for herself. Any hero unlucky enough to cross her path knows her potential and powers. Surely, success should taste she has an incredible job with lots of perks, and her boss will literally annihilate anyone who crosses her, and her greatest enemy, the former hero Supercollider, has been utterly defeated and literally ground to a pulp.
But Anna still has her sights set on a greater destroying the Draft, the organization that makes, trains, and manages the world’s most powerful superheroes. These “heroes” have shown time and time again that they do more harm than good, and now is the time to stop the damage at its source.
Yet all is not well for the Auditor and her fellow evildoers. Her employer, Leviathan—the world’s most feared supervillain—is not coping well with Supercollider’s defeat at someone else’s hands. Moreover, her unlikely ally and unexpected friend, Quantum Entanglement, has vanished without a trace, leaving Anna to examine all the ways they deceived each other. Tension and uncertainty fill the air, and fear that this moment of triumph is about to crumble looms over all of them.
Anna soon finds herself facing down an opponent unlike any she’s taken on before—not another superhero, but someone like her…someone much more the Draft’s Chief Marketing Officer. This isn’t a test of physical prowess, but ideas, and as the fight spirals deeper and deeper, with new foes popping up every day—she’ll need more than just her superpower—data research—to keep ascending through the supervillain ranks.
This is the second book in the Hench series. I didn’t enjoy this one quite as much as the first book, but I still liked it. Check out my reviews for both books, by clicking here and here.
What do you think? Have you heard about this book? Is it on your TBR? Let me know in the comments.
Until next time…
Confessions of a Serial Reader 