First Line Friday

First Lines Friday is hosted by Wandering Words for book lovers!

The Rules are:

• 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!

 

In the stirrups now.

Wish you were here…

I locked my phone and carried on looking at the ceiling before unlocking it and sending a follow-up ‘xx’. That would prove to Tom that I wasn’t as emotionally detached as he accuses me of being.

I read Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams at the start of the year and fell in love with Queenie. I laughed and cried alongside the character right from the beginning. Carty-Williams is a talented writer and I can’t believe this was her debut novel. I am really looking forward to reading whatever else she brings out in the future.

Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places…including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth.

As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, “What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be?”—all of the questions today’s woman must face in a world trying to answer them for her.