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’m reading a couple of books but the one I’ve just started is Island of Exiles (The Ryogan Chronicles #1) by Erica Cameron.

I press as close as possible to the sandstone wall of the ravine, trying to shove my whole body into the narrow strip of shade on the rising slope.  A few feet below, Rai does the same, pulling the canteen of water from the pack strapped to her thigh, loosening the atakafu cloth covering her mouth and nose, and sipping slowly.  The sight makes my mouth feel drier than ever.

My hand falls to my own thigh pack, and I toy with the ties holding it shut.  There isn’t much water left in my canteen, and I don’t know how much longer we’ll be enduring the brutal, dehydrating heart of the desert sun.  The hunt has been longer than we expected and far trickier than it should be.

Pulling my hand away from the temptation, I search the path above us for any sign of our prey.  There isn’t anywhere else the teegras could have gone once they entered the ravine, but we haven’t spotted a single trace of them since – wait  There.

“Rai, look.”  My murmured words are muffled by the atakafu, but it’s enough to draw her attention to fresh claw marks on the red sandstone.

My First Impressions

I like the way this one starts.  It has a good opening, there’s a hunt under difficult conditions and just what are these ‘teegras’??  On top of that I’m really feeling stories with a desert type setting at the moment so I need to read on and find out more.

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.