Welcome to entry #4 for First Lines Fridays! Every week (or whenever the mood strikes), I’ll be sharing the opening line of a book—no title, no author—just the first sentence that sets the whole story in motion.
First Lines Fridays is a weekly post hosted by Wandering Words. In this post instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines.
To do this simply:
- 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!
First line (prologue):
“Isabelle Marlowe smiled at the world as she walked down the bustling, crowded Manhattan street.”
Do you recognise what line this book is from?
Okay, here’s a hint for you… it’s a Beauty and the Beast retelling.
Still unsure? Here’s your last hint… it’s written by Jasmine Guillory.
Keep scrolling down for the BIG REVEAL!
A tale as old as time—for a new generation…
Isabelle is completely lost. When she first began her career in publishing right out of college, she did not expect to be twenty-five, living at home, still an editorial assistant, and the only Black employee at her publishing house. Overworked and underpaid, constantly torn between speaking up or stifling herself, Izzy thinks there must be more to this publishing life. So when she overhears her boss complaining about a beastly high-profile author who has failed to deliver his long-awaited manuscript, Isabelle sees an opportunity to finally get the promotion she deserves.
All she has to do is go to the author’s Santa Barbara mansion and give him a quick pep talk or three. How hard could it be?
But Izzy quickly finds out she is in over her head. Beau Towers is not some celebrity lightweight writing a tell-all memoir. He is jaded and withdrawn and—it turns out—just as lost as Izzy. But despite his standoffishness, Izzy needs Beau to deliver, and with her encouragement, his story begins to spill onto the page. They soon discover they have more in common than either of them expected, and as their deadline nears, Izzy and Beau begin to realize there may be something there that wasn’t there before.
[Did you guess right?]
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