Hook #8: Supernova

She was supposed to live like anyone else. To live like death was faraway, a concept more than a reality. I had meant for her to go through life in a series of steps. Ordinary steps. Go to grade school. Then middle school. Have her first crush, her first period. Then high school. Have her first boyfriend, her first disappointing sexual encounter. Graduate. Then college. Have her first successful sexual encounter. Pick a career. Graduate. Get a job in her career of choice. Get engaged. Get married. Have kids. Watch those kids do all the things she did. Retire. Then die.

Looking into Hooks: A Series of Unfortunate Events

“If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.”

"I'm unique and original and stuffs"

I was looking through The Best Opening Lines from Books and I couldn’t help but comment on this one. I remember how popular this book was in grade school. As an eleven year old girl with a weight problem you can bet I was hardcore into setting myself apart from the crowd, and being an individual. This meant I was walking around with printed pictures of anime characters strung around my neck like necklaces and wearing punky wristbands. What it did NOT mean was giving into the “in” book of the moment. Also, to be honest I was a lazy kid and reading a series longer than three or four books was daunting to me. But I gave in.

"Things don't go well for us... and we're not just talking about the movie franchaise"

This, in my opinion, is one of the best hooks ever written for its genre. It plays on the urge all young children and tweens have to blatantly rebel against orders. This opening line wasn’t just a polite suggestion, it was a challenge, it was the author putting her book out there, then asking you to put it down when you already had it in your hands. So as soon as you read that line you marched up to the register and demanded your guardian purchase this book for you so you could show it that you were grown up and could handle a little tragedy. This is something you would later take back when you found yourself smashing your head against a wall a wondering when these poor orphans would finally catch a break.

The only downfall? It doesn’t really hold you out for the entire series. At least it didn’t for me. Somewhere between borrowing the fourth book from the library, never bringing it back, and then donating it to Good Will, I could make it to the tenth book… or was it eleven?

Had to share this…

I had to share this. I think it’s pretty relevant considering that half of this blog is hooks, and this person is basically cataloging what they think are the best 100 opening lines from books. I’m busy with studying for an exam that I have soon, but hopefully I can make a few short posts about what I think of these opening lines before I get back to the reviewing business.

Next will either be “Bossypants” by Tina Fey or something else…

Hook #7: Snow Globe

Livian Brian let his gaze drift over me slowly, and small hairs at the back of my neck stood on end. The exchange took less than a second, but it revealed to me that he too had learned to pass inspection. It was dangerous, and more than I was frightened that he could pass, I was terrified that he knew I could as well. He had the power to, in an instant, expose me and effectively draw my careful planning to a close. If he were anyone but Livian Brian I might have had the same power over him, but as it were I didn’t.

Hook #6: The Quarterlife Crisis

“Do you know, that before your mid-life crisis you have at least four other crises?”

That’s amazing, riveting, I think dryly. Jane likes to share things she’s learned with the rest of us. It, likely, makes her feel very cultured and intelligent. Not much intelligence in reading the first story you come upon in some lifestyle magazine at the dentist’s office. Without a source to credit validity simply comes down to performance.

And so I sit on a cream slip cover segmented couch, swirling the untouched wine in my glass. I don’t drink, I’d said.

Hook #5: The Estrangement of Dr. Fry

He had two cavities. One in his upper molar on the right side and the other on the left. Michelle smiled at him and pulled the teal mask over her face.

“Open as wide as possible please.”

His lips cracked and broke on either side. He thought distractedly that he should have put something on. He almost used a lip-balm sample he found under the sink in the bathroom, but thought better of it. Shiny lips on a man he thought, what would people say?

Hook #4: Loretta’s Antique Emporium

I used to think the everyone’s purpose in life was simply to live. It didn’t matter whether that meant conducting heart surgery to save a child’s life, or sitting in an alley shooting up. As long as there was blood in your veins and air in your lungs you were living. It took me eighteen years to realize that life wasn’t like that. The mailman delivering shitty rom com dvds from Netflix, the mother of two, even the astronaut in space, none of them were living. Not really.

Hook #3: If I Should Die Before I Wake

The blue horizon stretched across my vision and wild blooms with strange dotted petals bat against my legs. Dad would have loved it. They all would have. Giant shining beams of light flashed in the distance. It was like granddad’s movies from when he was a kid. At first I never wanted to watch them. They were black and white, the sounds were made by people, and the effects by shining different lights on the screen. Soon I found myself looking forward to those nights. Now it was just me, Evie, and flashing beams of light against a blue horizon.

Hook #2: Ezra Cloud

There had always been something peculiar but fascinating about Ezra Cloud. Charlie saw it in the way he walked—a confident stride even with the tip of his right foot turned inwards. He had the appearance of being a boy of fortunate mistakes. His haircut was asymmetrical and most days he dressed in a mismatched array of colours and trinkets always paired with dark blue jeans. He was a boy, she thought, unlike other boys.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

First Paragraph of Book: My name is Kathy H. I am thirty-one years old and I’ve been a carer for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year. That’ll make it almost exactly twelve years.

"I'm gonna win the Pul-Pul-Pulit-Pulitzer prize! There! I said it!"

Review: I first encountered this book in grade twelve when it was recommended to me by my English teacher for an essay. I read the first line and immediately put the book back down. My thoughts were: This book is garbage and sounds like a poorly read seven-year old wrote it… or like the epilogue of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  In all honesty, the only reason I gave this book a second chance was because I heard a movie adaptation would be coming out starring Andrew Garfield, who I adore. While I strongly disagree with how Ishiguro chose to begin this novel, I strongly urge others to push past the opening and continue on with the novel.

Never Let Me Go tells the story of a specific sub-section of society that are raised with the knowledge that they will eventually be required to donate all their vital organs and will likely never see their 30th birthdays. Specifically it follows Kathy H. who attends Hailsham, a sort of Harvard among the other boarding schools for these types of children.

In a hipster world this would be ironic. and therefore amazing.

Kathy is a protagonist that prefers to take a more passive role in life as a student in Hailsham. Her most outlandish action as a child is befriending Tommy, a boy rejected by his peers for consistently throwing raging temper tantrums and being bad at art. Yes, bad at art. People in Hailsham have giant hard-ons for art, and students who can draw little more than stick figures are mocked. While Tommy doesn’t become better at art until he leaves the school, he manages to keep his temper in check and become accepted by his peers. He even does one better and begins to date Kathy’s best friend Ruth. Despite the fact that Kathy likes Tommy, on Ruth’s request, she spends her efforts on keeping Ruth and Tommy together.

Kathy is not a fighter. As a character she comes off as doormat and often I couldn’t tell if she was ridiculously self-sacrificing or simply too cowardly to pursue her own goals. But somehow, as a character she is still likeable. While she is essentially Ruth’s bitch for a large portion of the novel, she also has moments where she can be cruel, or be as frustrated with herself as the reader is with her. The best thing about this novel, besides the cool faux-utopian plot, are the characters. Kathy H. may be the main point of view but her relationships with the others are so realistic and well-developed that even the minor characters have the positive and negative traits that make each person uniquely human.

It is these traits that make the novel so beautiful and sad.  It’s impossible to move people with a book driven almost entirely by plot with flat, neglected characters. I like this novel because the characters are so human and real that by the end Kathy H. becomes more than the thirty-one year old carer we were introduced to in the beginning, she becomes as real as anyone you might meet on the street.