First Line(s) Friday | September 10, 2021

Happy Friday! Today I am participating in First Line Friday, hosted by Reading is My Superpower, AND First Lines Friday, created by Wandering Words!

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!

Full Disclosure: this is not technically the first line. But the first line was too spoilery, so this is the first line of the second paragraph. 🙂

“I straightened and looked toward the chapel.”

Anyone have any guesses on what book this is? I’ll give you a few clues…

Last chance to guess!

Today’s book is…

Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson
Published on October 5, 2021 by Margaret K. McElderry Books
Genres: Fantasy, Neurodivergent, YA
Pages: 400
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Author Links: Website, Twitter, Goodreads, Instagram, Tumblr

From the New York Times bestselling author of Sorcery of Thorns and An Enchantment of Ravens comes a thrilling new YA fantasy about a teen girl with mythic abilities who must defend her world against restless spirits of the dead.
The dead of Loraille do not rest.
Artemisia is training to be a Gray Sister, a nun who cleanses the bodies of the deceased so that their souls can pass on; otherwise, they will rise as spirits with a ravenous hunger for the living. She would rather deal with the dead than the living, who trade whispers about her scarred hands and troubled past.
When her convent is attacked by possessed soldiers, Artemisia defends it by awakening an ancient spirit bound to a saint’s relic. It is a revenant, a malevolent being that threatens to possess her the moment she drops her guard. Wielding its extraordinary power almost consumes her—but death has come to Loraille, and only a vespertine, a priestess trained to wield a high relic, has any chance of stopping it. With all knowledge of vespertines lost to time, Artemisia turns to the last remaining expert for help: the revenant itself.
As she unravels a sinister mystery of saints, secrets, and dark magic, her bond with the revenant grows. And when a hidden evil begins to surface, she discovers that facing this enemy might require her to betray everything she has been taught to believe—if the revenant doesn’t betray her first.

“I straightened and looked toward the chapel.”

I’m reading Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson for an upcoming blog tour and I’m LOVING IT! It started off slow, but now that I feel like I have a better grasp on the writing style and the worldbuilding, I’m excited to reread it in the future!

What have you been reading lately? Let me know in the comments and have a splendiferous day!

Do you participate in either of these memes? Let me know if you do and link your posts in the comments so I can visit! And don’t forget to have a splendiferous week!