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!

Happy Friday! I have absolutely no plans this weekend and I am really looking forward to it. I’m hoping to get my Christmas tree put up, but other than that it’s just going to be me, strictly and some books. For this weeks book I couldn’t resist spotlighting a 2022 release that recently showed up in my inbox thanks to Susan. It’s by a new to me author, but someone Susan loves, so I have mega high expectations for it.

“A week was too long to be a widow. Even after all her marriages, Rhea had never got used to it. The black, the singing, the veils – it was enough to drive anybody mad. As least no one expected her to cry.”

Well, I’m certainly intrigued. It’s the first book in an epic new fantasy series, filled with mythology and magic. Ready to find out what it is?

Twins imbued with incredible magic and near-immortality will do anything to keep their family safe—even if it tears the siblings apart—in the first book of a mythic epic fantasy from the New York Times bestselling author of Wilder Girls.

Rhea and her twin brother, Lexos, have spent an eternity helping their father rule their small, unstable country, using their control over the seasons, tides, and stars to keep the people in line. For a hundred years, they’ve been each other’s only ally, defending each other and their younger siblings against their father’s increasingly unpredictable anger.

Now, with an independence movement gaining ground and their father’s rule weakening, the twins must take matters into their own hands to keep their family—and their entire world—from crashing down around them. But other nations are jockeying for power, ready to cross and double cross, and if Rhea and Lexos aren’t careful, they’ll end up facing each other across the battlefield.