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!

The book i’m choosing to spotlight for this weeks first line Friday is a Sci-Fi release I read recently that blew me away. Full of female astronauts, complicated characters and ethical issues, this book hit a little close to home.

In thirty years, Dr Naomi Lovelace has never given an interview.

Whenever I asked her to tell me what happened up there, Naomi would say no one who’s been to space could ever describe it to someone who hasn’t.

They could use all the pretty language they liked. You might be able to come close, and she told me once – she was always complimentary about my writing – but you never really know what it was like. Others will judge the choices she made, what she risked, how close she came to utter destruction. Let them, she always said. I’m used to their hatred by now.

Are you intrigued yet? Ready to find out what it is???

Despite increasing restrictions on the freedoms of women on Earth, Valerie Black is spearheading the first all-female mission to a planet in the Goldilocks Zone, where conditions are just right for human habitation.

The team is humanity’s last hope for survival, and Valerie has gathered the best women for the mission: an ace pilot who is one of the only astronauts ever to have gone to Mars; a brilliant engineer tasked with keeping the ship fully operational; and an experienced doctor to keep the crew alive. And then there’s Naomi Lovelace, Valerie’s surrogate daughter and the ship’s botanist, who has been waiting her whole life for an opportunity to step out of Valerie’s shadow and make a difference.

The problem is that they’re not the authorized crew, even if Valerie was the one to fully plan the voyage. When their mission is stolen from them, they steal the ship bound for the new planet.

But when things start going wrong on board, Naomi begins to suspect that someone is concealing a terrible secret — and realizes time for life on Earth may be running out faster than they feared . . .

This book hit a little close to home for me, but it was beautifully written and is the perfect story for today’s political and environmental climate. You can find my full review for it here.