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!
• 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!

Hello! I have SO enjoyed having this week off work. I managed to get a little reading it, but spending it with family and friends with what happened over the last year and a half, made sure I wasn’t overly bothered. A little sad to be going back on Monday, but at least I have this weekend free to get me back into night mode.

For a little while I’m going to be using these posts to highlight books that have been on my TBR for far too long. My aim for the end of the year is to stop requesting ARC’s and hopefully pick up some backlist books, and the one I’ve picked for this week sounds like a winner. It’s a series I’ve heard so many amazing things about, and after reading the first page I definitely struggled to put it down (damn my TBR.)

“Tell me a story,’

The monster slouched down by the Iron bars of Kihrin’s jail cell. She set a small, plain stone down on the ground between them and pushed it forward.”

I honestly struggled so hard to not just carry on and read this book, but my every growing TBR looms, and hopefully it’s a promising sign I will actually pick it up at some point… soon. Ready to find out what it is?

Kihrin is a bastard orphan who grew up on storybook tales of long-lost princes and grand quests. When he is claimed against his will as the long-lost son of a treasonous prince, Kihrin finds that being a long-lost prince isn’t what the storybooks promised.

Far from living the dream, Kihrin finds himself practically a prisoner, at the mercy of his new family’s power plays and ambitions. He also discovers that the storybooks have lied about a lot of other things too: dragons, demons, gods, prophecies, true love, and how the hero always wins.

Then again, maybe he’s not the hero, for Kihrin is not destined to save the empire.

He’s destined to destroy it.