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!

She couldn’t remember the first book she had eaten.

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Pica is an eating disorder that involves eating items that are not typically thought of as food and that do not contain significant nutritional value, such as hair, dirt, and paint chips. 

National Eating Disorders Website

In case you were curious about why someone would eat a book, or didn’t know that it was actually an eating disorder, I gave a link to a website so you could learn a little more about it. I hope that helps.

From the author of You Must Not Miss comes a haunting contemporary horror novel that explores themes of mental illness, rage, and grief, twisted with spine-chilling elements of Stephen King and Agatha Christie.

Following her father’s death, Jane North-Robinson and her mom move from sunny California to the dreary, dilapidated old house in Maine where her mother grew up. All they want is a fresh start, but behind North Manor’s doors lurks a history that leaves them feeling more alone…and more tormented.

As the cold New England autumn arrives, and Jane settles in to her new home, she finds solace in old books and memories of her dad. She steadily begins making new friends, but also faces bullying from the resident “bad seed,” struggling to tamp down her own worst nature in response. Jane’s mom also seems to be spiraling with the return of her childhood home, but she won’t reveal why. Then Jane discovers that the “storage room” her mom has kept locked isn’t for storage at all–it’s a little girl’s bedroom, left untouched for years and not quite as empty of inhabitants as it appears….

Is it grief? Mental illness? Or something more…horrid?

I’m slowly and surely getting through this one, and I think that I’m enjoying it. It’s definitely getting pretty creepy, and I appreciate the group at TBR & Beyond for giving me some insight on the Pica eating disorder so I could figure out that our main character Jane wasn’t just eating books to eat books. I figured that there was a reason for it, and I figured that the author didn’t just add it for the shock factor, but having that confirmed for me really helped so I’m glad to hear it.

I’m waiting for people to share their thoughts on what they think about it but I know that the consensus is that the cover is pretty gorgeous. I can definitely agree with that. I really like the roses, and so far that seems to be having a meaning in the plot as far as where I’m at in the book. It keeps coming up, but no explanation yet. Pretty creepy though if I do say so myself.

Is anyone going to read it? Has anyone already read it yet?

Can’t wait to hear some thoughts.