Friday Firsts : The Sisters Mederos by Patrice Sarath
30 March 2018
Filed under Book Reviews
Tags: Friday Firsts, Patrice Sarath, The Sisters Mederos, The Tenacious Reader
Friday Firsts is a new meme that runs every Friday over on Tenacious Reader. The idea is to feature the opening sentences/paragraphs 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. This Friday I’m reading : The Sisters Mederos by Patrice Sarath: This is the start of Chapter 1 (following the prologue):
Tesara pretended she didn’t hear the loud whispers as she browsed the open window display of Sturridges, on the Mile. The fine gifts emporium was decorated for Saint Frey’s Day It was filled with gilded ribbons and chocolates, delicate porcelain, and fragile silk scarves of yellow and green for Spring. She cocked her head exactly as if she were contemplating the difference between a delicately painted blown-glass egg and a cameo brooch, and in the meantime, took in all the none-too-subtle gossip around her. She and her sister had only been home two weeks, but the rumor engine of Port Saint Frey was nothing if not efficient.
“I can’t believe she shows her face in public.”
“Look at that bonnet. Can you imagine?”
“She’s gotten so worn. I heard she and her sister were reduced to scrubbing floors at a school for paupers.”
Tesara schooled her face into a smile and turned to face her tormentors. The cluster of merchant misses huddled near the door, and as one they gasped and fled inside the store, their skirts rustling as they whisked inside to safety, where she dared not follow. She could look all she wanted, but she knew what would happen if she tried to enter. Even worse than the gossip of her former peers would be the crossed arms and forbidding posture of the shop girl. The humiliation of denied entry would finish what the misses had wrought – her complete and utter dismissal from society. Once more alone, she turned back to her private contemplation of the lovely things she could no longer afford.
My First Impressions
Well, straight away it is apparent that the sisters family has lost it’s fortune and society is being less than kind. This snippet, with the bullying and condescending attitude of the other ‘ladies’ immediately makes me feel defensive of Tesara. I can’t really glean a lot from these first chapters but I do like the feel that this is going to be a ‘manners, bonnets and ribbons’ style story.
What you reading this Friday?? What are your first impressions??
*The above excerpt was taken from an advanced reader copy and it is possible that the final version may have further changes.
Friday Firsts : Feeder by Patrick Weekes
23 March 2018
Filed under Book Reviews
Tags: Feeder, Friday Firsts, Patrick Weekes, The Tenacious Reader
Friday Firsts is a new meme that runs every Friday over on Tenacious Reader. The idea is to feature the opening sentences/paragraphs 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. This Friday I’m reading : Feeder by Patrick Weekes
Monday
Lori
The message about the new feeder came while Loi Fisher was trying to get her brother, Ben, to eat his breakfast.
“This is what you said you wanted,” Lori said, putting the toast down in front of him.
Ben, seven years old and blessed with a complexion that made him look perfectly tanned, while Lori herself just looked sallow, glared at Lori and let out a put-upon breath as he pushed the toast away. “I said toast. I didn’t say toast with butter!”
“Toast implies butter, though. Toast comes with butter,” Lori said, and then she looked down as her phone buzzed.
Handler: New feeder. Taxi will pick you up.
“I didn’t want the butter part!” Ben insisted, playing angrily with a Lego figure on their large and cluttered kitchen table as the toast sat uneaten in front of him. “I just wanted the toast part!”
“Okay, but the butter is on the toast already. I can’t take if off. Can you eat it just today for me?” Lori gave her brother a hopeful smile, then looked down at the phone again and tapped in a response.
Lori: I was going shopping with Jenn.
Handler: Sorry. And client wants to consult.
My First Impressions
It’s not giving much away so far is it. It all seems quite pedestrian at first glance. Breakfast time, arguing siblings. The only oddity slipping in is this ‘Handler’ – who is this and what is a Feeder? It has a feel like Mission Impossible or something – where somebody is leading a regular life but underneath it all – there’s a Handler – who talks of ‘feeders’ and clients who want to meet. Mmm, I look forward to finding out.
What you reading this Friday?? What are your first impressions??
*The above excerpt was taken from an advanced reader copy and it is possible that the final version may have further changes.
Friday Firsts: Planetfall by Emma Newman
16 March 2018
Filed under Book Reviews
Tags: Emma Newman, Friday Firsts, Planetfall, tenacious reader
Friday Firsts is a new meme that runs every Friday over on Tenacious Reader. The idea is to feature the first few sentences/paragraphs 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. This Friday I’m reading : Planetfall by Emma Newman
Every time I come down here I think about my mother. I don’t want to: it just happens. My brain has decided it’s a critical subroutine that must be executed when the correct variables are in place: (which time = predawn) + (when physical location = beneath the colony) + (when physical act = opening the door to the Masher) run “unpleasant memory of mother #345.”
My hand is pushing the door open and I’m back at my old lab and she’s following me in, her heels clicking on the tiled floor. I’ve prepped the equipment to run one hour before her arrival so there’s something to show straightaway. She never was a patient woman.
“Is that a printer?” she asked, and I nodded. It started then – I know it now that I’m looking back – that tightening of my gut as I dared to hope I might impress her.
“Yeah.” I smiled.
She didn’t. “Like the one I have at home?”
“Better.”
“What’s it printing?”
“My latest work.”
She went up to the plasglass and peered through, seeing nothing but a few millimeters of tissue. She turned to me with her nose slightly wrinkled. “What is is printing?”
“A new pancreas,” I said. “For Dad.”
“Oh.” She’d hoped I was making something she could hang up in the hallway of her inert home. “I didn’t realise you were involved in this sort of thing. I’ve seen it on the new.”
And that was the moment I knew I’d been stupid to hope for anything.
My First Impressions
Well, there’s not really much given away here is there? It’s a memory, although clearly of a future that is more advanced than ours – if you can print out a pancreas – or is that already possible??!?! I think my immediate fear was on reading the little algebraic type problem in brackets I wondered if this was going to maybe be a little bit more problematic than I hoped (in terms of going over my rather simple head). However, it’s not working out like that so far so we’ll see and I must confess that on typing out this quote and rereading it for accuracy I completely understand what it means but in the immediate furore of starting a new book and rushing through the first few pages it did fly over my head. Silly, I realise. Anyway, so far so good.
What you reading this Friday?? What are your first impressions??
*The above excerpt was taken from an advanced reader copy and it is possible that the final version may have further changes.
Friday Firsts: Master Assassins by Robert VS Redick
2 March 2018
Filed under Book Reviews
Tags: Friday Firsts, Master Assassins, Robert VS Redick, The Tenacious Reader
Friday Firsts is a new meme that runs every Friday over on Tenacious Reader. The idea is to feature the first few sentences/paragraphs 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. This Friday I’m reading : Master Assassins by Robert VS Redick
‘By the third day the rumor can no longer be contained. It is whispered in the black tents, shared like smokes among the men on patrol, murmured in the drill yard before the bellowed morning prayer. It is weird and horrific and yet a curse no one can fail to understand. Someone’s mind has been stolen, and the thief still walks the camp.
The signs are innumerable. The Master of Horses finds two stallions lamed overnight. An armory clerk displays a broadsword twisted into a spiral like a blade of grass. A cook discovers worms thick as men’s fingers writhing in the belly of a well-roasted boar. And the Prophet’s eldest son has a toothache.
These calamities, and others shared over dawn biscuits or evening rubbish-fires or blazing midday marches, point to a single conclusion. The camp is under attack, and the assailant can only be a yatra, a spirit-thief, which as everyone knows can work dark magic from within its victim’s pilfered soul.
My First Impressions
Oh my, colour me intrigued. Superstitions running amok in an army camp. Can’t wait to sink my teeth properly into this one – I’ve heard very good things about this book and I will admit my expectations are running high. I already like the writing style so this bodes well.
What you reading this Friday?? What are your first impressions??
*The above excerpt was taken from an advanced reader copy and it is possible that the final version may have further changes.
Friday Firsts : Semiosis by Sue Burke
23 February 2018
Filed under Book Reviews
Tags: Friday Firsts, Semiosis, Sue Burke, tenacious reader
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??
Books and travelling with Lynn 