First Line Friday – May 4, 2021

First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

• Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
• Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first.
• Finally… reveal the book!

First Lines!

There are those in this country who arrogantly suggest the old religion’s dead, As if any amount of torture and erasing could sever those blood-deep ties. What do they think kept their chattel alive? Stephanie St. Clair’s chuckle is as bitter as a centuries-old grudge.

Even those lost lambs who don’t recognize it practice it all the same. She calls it Yoruba. Other children of Africa label it Santeria, candomblé, even voodoo. Name doesn’t matter, though; they’re all follicles from the same nappy head.

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It’s Bacchanal by Veronica G. Henry

Amazon US (Affiliate Link)

Bacchanal Blurb

Evil lives in a traveling carnival roaming the Depression-era South. But the carnival’s newest act, a peculiar young woman with latent magical powers, may hold the key to defeating it. Her time has come.

Abandoned by her family, alone on the wrong side of the color line with little to call her own, Eliza Meeks is coming to terms with what she does have. It’s a gift for communicating with animals. To some, she’s a magical tender. To others, a she-devil. To a talent prospector, she’s a crowd-drawing oddity. And the Bacchanal Carnival is Eliza’s ticket out of the swamp trap of Baton Rouge.

Among fortune-tellers, carnies, barkers, and folks even stranger than herself, Eliza finds a new home. But the Bacchanal is no ordinary carnival. An ancient demon has a home there too. She hides behind an iridescent disguise. She feeds on innocent souls. And she’s met her match in Eliza, who’s only beginning to understand the purpose of her own burgeoning powers.

Only then can Eliza save her friends, find her family, and fight the sway of a primordial demon preying upon the human world. Rolling across a consuming dust bowl landscape, Eliza may have found her destiny. 

Goodreads