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!

Hello & happy Friday! Do you have anything fun planned for the weekend? I’ve had the craziest week at work, so am planning on doing nothing but chilling out, reading & maybe catching up on some TV. The book I’ve chosen to spotlight this week is an adult urban fantasy that sounds well and truly intriguing! It’s a debut and all about two estranged half-sisters tasked with guarding their family’s library of magical books, so sound right up my street.

“Abe Kalotay died in his front yard in late February, beneath a sky so pale is seemed infected.”

Ooooh well colour me intrigued! What a great first line. Ready to find out what it is?

For generations, the Kalotay family has guarded a collection of ancient and rare books. Books that let a person walk through walls or manipulate the elements–books of magic that half-sisters Joanna and Esther have been raised to revere and protect.

All magic comes with a price, though, and for years the sisters have been separated. Esther has fled to a remote base in Antarctica to escape the fate that killed her own mother, and Joanna’s isolated herself in their family home in Vermont, devoting her life to the study of these cherished volumes. But after their father dies suddenly while reading a book Joanna has never seen before, the sisters must reunite to preserve their family legacy. In the process, they’ll uncover a world of magic far bigger and more dangerous than they ever imagined, and all the secrets their parents kept hidden; secrets that span centuries, continents, and even other libraries . . .