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!
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So, here goes! First lines:
Friday, August 24
Stoop-Sitting
The summer is made for stoop-sitting
and since it’s the last week before school starts,
Harlem is opening it’s eyes to September.
I scope out this block I’ve always called home.
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Do you have some idea about this book?
Hint: It was released in 2018 and gained quite a lot of praise for the way it is written….
Alrighty then! Here goes….
This is my current read and has been on my TBR forever! I have a paperback copy and for some reason have not gotten around to reading it!
Title: The Poet X
Author: Elizabeth Acevedo
About the Book:
A young girl in Harlem discovers slam poetry as a way to understand her mother’s religion and her own relationship to the world. Debut novel of renowned slam poet Elizabeth Acevedo.
Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking.
But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. With Mami’s determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself.
So when she is invited to join her school’s slam poetry club, she doesn’t know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out, much less speak her words out loud. But still, she can’t stop thinking about performing her poems.
Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent.
redpillows 