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?
The Rules:- 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!
“Phoebe and her friends held their breath as the dead girl in the plaid skirt walked past their table in the lunchroom.”
Interested? Keep reading to find out which book this is from.
What it’s about:
Phoebe Kendall is just your typical Goth girl with a crush. She’s strong and silent… and dead.
All over the country, a strange phenomenon is occurring. Some teenagers who die aren’t staying dead. But when they come back to life, they are no longer the same. Feared and misunderstood, they are doing their best to blend into a society that doesn’t want them.
The administration at Oakvale High attempts to be more welcoming of the “differently biotic.” But the students don’t want to take classes or eat in the cafeteria next to someone who isn’t breathing. And there are no laws that exist to protect the “living impaired” from the people who want them to disappear—for good.
When Phoebe falls for Tommy Williams, the leader of the dead kids, no one can believe it; not her best friend, Margi, and especially not her neighbor, Adam, the star of the football team. Adam has feelings for Phoebe that run much deeper than just friendship; he would do anything for her. But what if protecting Tommy is the one thing that would make her happy?
Goodreads | Amazon |
I think this was one of my first YA series, back about in my early 20s (aka the early 2010s, because YA wasn’t so easy to find when I was a teen), and I remember loving it. I’d picked it up on a whim for about $2 somewhere, and I didn’t expect much, but ended up reading it in about a day. If I read it now, I have no clue what I would think of it, but back then I gave it 5 stars and devoured most of the rest of the series shortly after, and I feel like this series really helped kickstart my love of YA books.
I’ve been trying to use books that are on my TBR for First Lines Fridays, but I’m feeling the zombies this week, apparently (see this week’s Must Read Mondays), and a bit nostalgic. Plus, I don’t think this series ever got a ton of attention. It has about 12k ratings on goodreads, but I almost never see/hear about it anywhere.
So why did I use something I’ve already read for this week’s FLF? Because I remember opening this book, reading the first line, and deciding I needed to read this book
