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…
“We must, by law, keep a record of of the innocents we kill.”
Do you know this one?
This is the opening to an older YA dystopian series…
It features a sentient AI…
Have you guessed?
Yes? No?
Give up?
Here it is!
Scythe
Summary from Goodreads:
Thou shalt kill.
A world with no hunger, no disease, no war, no misery. Humanity has conquered all those things, and has even conquered death. Now scythes are the only ones who can end life—and they are commanded to do so, in order to keep the size of the population under control.
Citra and Rowan are chosen to apprentice to a scythe—a role that neither wants. These teens must master the “art” of taking life, knowing that the consequence of failure could mean losing their own.
With AI being so much in the news this last week, especially the doomsday scenarios everyone is talking about, I have been thinking about the books I have read with sentient AIs. The AI in this one is more or less benevolent, but that just makes the story all that more compelling. Plus with the whole no one ever dies thing in this story, makes for a very interesting plot.
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 