Friday Firsts is a new meme that runs every Friday over on Tenacious Reader. The idea is to feature the first few sentences/paragraph of your current book and try and outline your first impressions as a result. This is a quick and easy way to share a snippet of information about your current read and to perhaps tempt others.  Stop on by and link up with Tenacious Reader.    This week I’m reading  Defender (The Voices #1) by G.X. Todd (and loving it too I might add!)

At the beginning, Pilgrim missed a great many things, things that were by their very nature impossible not to miss once they were gone.  Imagining a hunk of cooked cow, for example, could torture a person.  It was easy to visualise a medium-rare steak, feel it melting as soon as it hit the tongue, molars sinking through the meaty plumpness and an explosion of juice gushing out.  It was enough to make his stomach cramp up like a fist and sit there just under his ribs in a solid, unignorable ball of want.

Then the next week he would miss something else.  Mashed potatoes, perhaps or fried okra.  There was a period of a month or more, near the beginning, when he would have travelled non-stop for a thousand miles if only at the end of the journey waited a thick, cold, strawberry milkshake.  The inanity of a craving couldn’t prevent it from rubbing on him like clothes on an open sore.

Quite often there was an absence of such culinary cravings, but those times were worse, for the ghosts of loved ones and more deep seated longings would creep around him instead.  Those he’d kept tightly bottled up for fear that if opened they would froth and volcano forth never to be contained again.

My First Impressions

Well, that opening (which is after a short introduction/prologue) is intriguing to say the least.  Who is Pilgrim?  Why is he longing for food and more to the point ‘loved ones’??  I’ve made good progress with this one and so far I’m loving it so you’ll just have to wait for the review.

What you reading this Friday??

*The above excerpt was taken from an advanced reader copy and it is possible that the final version may have further changes.