Fabulous First Line Friday (16 March)

Have you ever been hit with a wonderful story idea but when you sat down to write, you just couldn’t find a first line that would get the story flowing?

We read lots of books at the Alphabet Soup office. Lots. And we’ve noticed that we pick up some books to read before others because their first lines jump out and grab us and we want to read on and on. (The sort of books where you think ‘I’ll just look at the first page’ and you read the first line and then an hour later you hear someone calling you for dinner and you realise—OOPS—you’ve read 243 pages and you’re nearly to the end of the book … )

To celebrate the National Year of Reading, we thought it would be interesting to share some first lines from books on our bookshelves. So, every Friday for the rest of the year we’ll post a fabulous first line.

But isn’t it Friday TODAY? we hear you ask. Why, yes, it is! So here’s the very first Fabulous First Line Friday*:

It must be the longest day this winter, Grace thought, and all I’ve found are a few bits of coal and a piece of rope.

What do you think—if you opened a book and read that first line, would you want to read on?

Do you know the name of the book? (It’s at the end of this post.)

*For the purposes of Fabulous First Line Friday, we’re counting the first line as the first line of chapter 1 in any book. So if there is an introduction or an author’s note or something before chapter 1, we don’t count that bit …

The book is Our Australian Girl: Meet Grace by Sofie Laguna