This week's topic is: Top Ten Favorite Beginnings/Endings in Books
For this week, I’ve decided to look at some of my favorite first lines in young adult books. Too often, readers put down books because they can’t get into them right away - none of these books have that problem. Their first lines make an immediate impact - how can you not read the rest of the book when the first line is SO good?!Some of these lines are funny, gross, surprising, creepy, but they all share one trait - they get the reader’s attention!
Here’s a picture of a bulletin board I created in my classroom for this very topic - the opening line is on the front, and when you lift up the flap there’s the title and a picture of the book’s cover.
Here’s my TOP TEN (although I have a list of twenty if you want more):
- “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.”
Feed by M.T. Anderson
- “Things had been getting a little better until I got a letter from my dead sister. That more or less ruined my day.”
Dead Girls Don’t Write Letters by Gail Giles
- “Even before he got electrocuted, Jason was having a rotten day.”
The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan
- “The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.”
Uglies by Scott Westerfield
- “Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time thinking about death.”
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
- “The best day of my life happened when I was five and almost died at Disney World.”
Going Bovine by Libba Bray
- “It’s been sixty-four years since the president and the Consortium identified love as a disease, and forty-three since the scientists perfected a cure.”
Delirium by Lauren Oliver
- “My mother thinks I’m dead.”
Legend by Marie Lu
- “Of all the kids in seventh grade at Camillo Junior High, there was one kid that Mrs. Baker hated with heat whiter than the sun. Me.”
The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt
- “I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.”
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
I had forgotten about the awesome beginning on the bus in The Lost Hero. Riordan really does excel in great opening lines. :)
ReplyDeleteTTT @ Krista's Dust Jacket
The beginning of Uglies makes me smile every time I read it, although I didn't really like the book... or the rest of the series.
ReplyDeleteI focused on the end of The Fault in our Stars but I completely forgot that I love the beginning as well.
Roxy @ Story Envy