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

Lines

Curiouser and curiouser. Quoting my favorite line in my favorite book (Hi, Alice) was my first reaction when I came home from school today and saw the new laptop that I’d been heavily hinting at wanting for the last few months, placed carefully in the center of the small desk in my bedroom. Well. My first reaction was actually distrust. Now, I know that a normal reaction to receiving a gift that you’ve wanted for an eternity and a quarter should involve something like clasping your hands on either side of your face, tears of happiness sliding down your cheeks, and a toothy grin followed by a loud exclamation of “Oh, you shouldn’t have!” But gifting at my house doesn’t quite work out that way when you know for a fact that you’re not due to receive said gift for another six to nine months. Not when the only thing your divorced parents agree on is that their sole child should never feel entitled to anything without earning it, no matter what their salaries could provide.

And The Book Is…

Goodreads Blurb

When a school presentation goes very wrong, Alaine Beauparlant finds herself suspended, shipped off to Haiti and writing the report of a lifetime…

You might ask the obvious question: What do I, a seventeen-year-old Haitian American from Miami with way too little life experience, have to say about anything?

Actually, a lot.

Thanks to “the incident” (don’t ask), I’m spending the next two months doing what my school is calling a “spring volunteer immersion project.” It’s definitely no vacation. I’m toiling away under the ever-watchful eyes of Tati Estelle at her new nonprofit. And my lean-in queen of a mother is even here to make sure I do things right. Or she might just be lying low to dodge the media sharks after a much more public incident of her own…and to hide a rather devastating secret.

All things considered, there are some pretty nice perks…like flirting with Tati’s distractingly cute intern, getting actual face time with my mom and experiencing Haiti for the first time. I’m even exploring my family’s history—which happens to be loaded with betrayals, superstitions and possibly even a family curse.

You know, typical drama. But it’s nothing I can’t handle.

Alex