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 Christmas Eve! I hope however you’re spending this holiday break that you have a wonderful time. I’m travelling across to my sisters today and tonight were all heading to watch the new Spiderman! The book I’ve chosen for this weeks first line Friday is a recent addition to my TBR that took TicTok by storm. I’ve heard nothing but good things about this book and it may just get bumped to the top of my TBR.

” The day Libby Rhodes met Nicolas Ferrerde Carona was coincidentally also the day she discovered that ‘Incensed,’ a word she had previously had no use for, was now the only conceivable way to describe the sensation of being near him.”

This sounds like it’s going to be SO GOOD, and I can’t wait to start it. Ready to find out what it is???

The Alexandrian Society is a secret society of magical academicians, the best in the world. Their members are caretakers of lost knowledge from the greatest civilizations of antiquity. And those who earn a place among their number will secure a life of wealth, power, and prestige beyond their wildest dreams. Each decade, the world’s six most uniquely talented magicians are selected for initiation – and here are the chosen few…

– Libby Rhodes and Nicolás Ferrer de Varona: inseparable enemies, cosmologists who can control matter with their minds.
– Reina Mori: a naturalist who can speak the language of life itself.
– Parisa Kamali: a mind reader whose powers of seduction are unmatched.
– Tristan Caine: the son of a crime kingpin who can see the secrets of the universe.
– Callum Nova: an insanely rich pretty boy who could bring about the end of the world. He need only ask.

When the candidates are recruited by the mysterious Atlas Blakely, they are told they must spend one year together to qualify for initiation. During this time, they will be permitted access to the Society’s archives and judged on their contributions to arcane areas of knowledge. Five, they are told, will be initiated. One will be eliminated. If they can prove themselves to be the best, they will survive. Most of them.