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!
“He arrives at night, in the middle of a downpour, the type of conditions more suitable for a disappearance. I was alone in the lobby – removing the hand-carved walking sticks from the barrel beside the registration desk, replacing them with our stash of navy umbrellas – when someone pushed through one of the double doors at the entrance. The sound of rain cascading over the gutters; the rustle of hiking pants; the screech of wet boots on polished floors.”
Hello friends, it’s Top Ten Tuesday time once again and this week’s prompt is books with weather events in the title! So I went back over all the books I’ve read and here is what I found…
Cordelia Carstairs is a Shadowhunter, a warrior trained since childhood to battle demons. When her father is accused of a terrible crime, she and her brother travel to London in hopes of preventing the family’s ruin. Cordelia’s mother wants to marry her off, but Cordelia is determined to be a hero rather than a bride. Soon Cordelia encounters childhood friends James and Lucie Herondale and is drawn into their world of glittering ballrooms, secret assignations, and supernatural salons, where vampires and warlocks mingle with mermaids and magicians. All the while, she must hide her secret love for James, who is sworn to marry someone else.
So it has been probably about 4/5 years since I immersed into the Shadowhunter world and it felt very nostalgic and easy to get back into. This time around the series definitely felt very YA and as the series progressed it was quite easy to pretty much predict what was going to happen. Sure, there were some twists and turns that surprised me but there are quite a few repeat themes that keep popping up from previous series.
With Chain of Gold specifically I thought this was a pretty solid first book. It establishes all the main protagonists pretty well, however and this has been a gripe of mine from earlier series but there is always an influx of Shadowhunter families and characters that we are introduced to all at once and it is really hard to keep track and distinguish everyone from each other and what families they belong to. This book sets up the rest of the series very well and really gives us great insight into all of the relationships our core characters have with each other as well as the overarching mystery that spans all three books.
Chain of Iron broadens out the scope of the series by including more of the secondary characters and a bit more of the adults into the plotline. One things that starts to pop up in the this book is how many secrets each of these characters are keeping from each other which carries over into Chain of Thorns for sure. Had everyone just laid everything out on the table from the start a lot of the conflict could have been avoided which irritates me. It just seems like laziness to come up with all of these reasons why they can’t just come out and tell each other what is really happening instead of creating all these crazy justifications.
Chain of Thorns felt a little too long for me. I think the first third could of really been condensed down and added to the end of Chain of Iron. Was I a fan of the love triangle, no. Do I think it was used as fan service to everyone who were diehard fans of The Infernal Devices series, yes. I just don’t think it was necessary as Tessa, Will and Jem are very prominent in this series. Again, we learn a lot more about the minute details of Belial’s plan and see it unfold. We still have this miscommunication trope running rampant and everyone is starting to acknowledge that. The sex scenes were a very fade to black and awkward to read, I appreciated that it was included but still made me cringe.
Overall, this was a good series. Very on brand with the whole Shadowhunter franchise, it just seems like Cassandra Clare followed the same blueprint just changed around a few details and expanded on those changes. Not my favorite by any means, but very entertaining and you do have this group of friends that you want to root for and see succeed.
This is a twisted tale of murder, obsessive love, and the beastly urges that lie dormant within us all…even the God-fearing folk of Bottom Springs, Louisiana. In her small hometown, librarian Ruth Cornier has always felt like an outsider, even as her beloved father rains fire-and-brimstone warnings from the pulpit at Holy Fire Baptist. When a skull is found deep in the swamp next to mysterious carved symbols, Bottom Springs is thrown into uproar—and Ruth realizes only she and Everett, an old friend with a dark past, have the power to comb the town’s secret underbelly in search of true evil.
I’m in two minds about Ruth as a character. She is a pastor’s daughter and the church and her daddy’s beliefs are all that she knows so it makes sense that she is become indoctrinated but some of the choices she makes throughout the course of the plotline were just bizarre to me. Even though she suffers so much at the hands of her parents and is shown by Everett how bad the church is she doesn’t reject it when she moves out. Then how she gives her father another chance at the end when he has demonstrated time and time again that he doesn’t think he is wrong, I was just like what are you doing??
I was definitely invested and curious as to where this story was going. I liked the flashbacks to when Ruth was younger and we are given more context as to why she has chosen to stay in Bottom Springs and how she became friends with Everett. There are quite a few twists and unexpected turns that keep you wanting to read on and as it progressed it got more and more unhinged.
I didn’t go into this book knowing anything about it to be honest and had I known it was going to be so heavily revolving around religion I probably wouldn’t of picked it up. To see the people in this town justifying this bigoted way of living was aggravating and exhausting to read and the hypocritical twist behind the mystery of what happened to these men wasn’t satisfying to me at all. Sure justice was served in the end but at what cost, especially after the way the book ends.
⭐️2/5 stars I’m sure a lot of people would enjoy it but it wasn’t for me…
Amy Leigh Reads 