First Lines: Middle Grade Books

 

Another First Lines post to feed my passion and your imagination. (I feel a bit like a literary Willy Wonka…)

Possibly this post will inspire you to sneak in a beach book or summer reading for your kids. ? Just a thought.

This is my middle grade book post. I admit I have a difficult time differentiating between children’s and MG. The Hobbit and Harry Potter are children’s. But so are Magic Tree House and Judy Moody. There are board books, picture books, readers, chapter books… This is a murky, grey area of writing and reading and marketing.

Anyhoo, these are the books I chose as middle grade, whether they are or not. There’s an overlap and I’m overlapping.

On to the first lines…

 

“Sophie had waited all her life to be kidnapped.”

The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani

 

“I know I’m not an ordinary ten-year-old kid. I mean, sure, I do ordinary things. I eat ice cream. I ride my bike. I play ball. I have an X-box. Stuff like that makes me ordinary, I guess. And I feel ordinary. Inside. But I know ordinary kids don’t make other ordinary kids run away screaming in playgrounds.”

Wonder by R.J. Palacio

 

“Carter here. Look, we don’t have time for long introductions. I need to tell this story quickly, or we’re all going to die.”

The Kane Chronicles Book 2: The Throne of Fire by Rick Riordan 

 

“Even before he got electrocuted, Jason was having a rotten day.”

The Heroes of Olympus Book 1: The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan

“It is difficult to choose a new name for oneself. Even more difficult, I imagine, than choosing a name for a child, for one is confusingly intimate with oneself, whereas one is barely acquainted with a baby upon its arrival.”

An Enola Holmes Mystery: The Case of the Bizarre Bouquets by Nancy Springer

 

“You don’t just fall into supervillainy.”

Book 1: The Cloak Society by Jeramey Kraatz 

 

“Wind howled through the night, carrying a scent that would change the world.”

Eragon by Christopher Paolini

“Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her parents’ house, where she washed the same pink-and-yellow teacups and matching gravy boats every day, slept on the same embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog. Because she had been born in May, and because she had a mole on her left cheek, and because her feet were very large and ungainly, the Green Wind took pity on her and flew to her window one evening just after her twelfth birthday.”

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente 

 

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis

 

“The deputy told me to empty my pockets: two quarters, a penny, a stick of bubble gum, and a roll of grip tape for my skateboard. It was pitiful.”

Flush by Carl Hiaasen

 

“The day before Mrs. Starch vanished, her third-period biology students trudged silently, as always, into the classroom.”

Scat by Carl Hiaasen 

“We have not yet seen Tomorrow. We have not yet dared go there.”

How to Train Your Dragon Book 11: How to Betray a Dragon’s Hero by Cressida Cowell

 

Next up:

First Lines: YA

As a reader (and a writer) how important are first lines to you?