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 Friday I’ve just started Semiosis by Sue Burke

The war had begun long before we arrived because war was their way of life  It took its first victims among us before we understood what was happening, on an evening that seemed quiet.  But even then, we knew we could easily be in danger.

My wife, Paula, shook her head as she left the radio hut in the plaza of our little village.  “There’s too much interference again,  I’ll try one more time, but if they don’t answer, we’ll start a search.”

An hour ago, three women had gone to pick fruit.  They did not come back, they were not answering their radio, and the Sun had sunk almost to the top of the hills.

Around us, tiny lizards in the trees had begun their evening hoots and chimes.  Nine-legged crabs silently hunted the lizards.  The breeze smelled bittersweet, perhaps from something in bloom.  I should have known what, but I did not.

Uri and I were fixing an irrigation pump, but I knew his mind was on one of the women, Ninia.  He had just begun living with her, and he was squinting up the path through the fields where she had gone.  And then he was jerked back to the present when the wind tangled his long blond beard around the pump handle.  He knelt to free it.  I pulled a jackknife from my belt, stroking my own short beard.  He saluted with one finger.  He was a Russian Slav, and a proper Slav never cuts his beard.

Paula went back to her work at a rough-hewn table nearby, trying to make sense of weather data.  A wide straw hat held her red hair in place and protected her skin from the Sun.  She took a deep breath and stretched her stiff back.  We all struggled with the stronger gravity.  Finally she entered the radio hut again.

Everyone stopped what they were doing and listened.  The hut’s walls were panels scavenged from a landing pod and the roof was tree bark, so the sound carried.

“Hello?… Ninia? Zee? Carrie?”

static

“Hello?… This is Paula.  Do you hear me?”

Static.

My First Impressions

Wow, what a great start.   I’m hooked.  Firstly this talk of war and then three missing women.  I have to know what’s going on.  This is an intriguing start to the book.  Fingers crossed for this one.

What you reading this Friday??  What are your first impressions??