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!

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Nine hundred and ninety-nine candles lit the Iron Shrine.

Ana curved a crescent moon across her chest – in honor of the Goddess she didn’t believe in – to disguise tucking three coppers from the offering tray into her burgundy coat.

Di gave her a long look as he sat in the pew beside her.

“What? It’s called an investment,” she told her best friend. “Don’t give me that look.”

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Heart of Iron by Ashley Poston

Seventeen-year-old Ana is a scoundrel by nurture and an outlaw by nature. Found as a child drifting through space with a sentient android called D09, Ana was saved by a fearsome space captain and the grizzled crew she now calls family. But D09—one of the last remaining illegal Metals—has been glitching, and Ana will stop at nothing to find a way to fix him.

Ana’s desperate effort to save D09 leads her on a quest to steal the coordinates to a lost ship that could offer all the answers. But at the last moment, a spoiled Ironblood boy beats Ana to her prize. He has his own reasons for taking the coordinates, and he doesn’t care what he’ll sacrifice to keep them.

When everything goes wrong, she and the Ironblood end up as fugitives on the run. Now their entire kingdom is after them—and the coordinates—and not everyone wants them captured alive.

What they find in a lost corner of the universe will change all their lives—and unearth dangerous secrets. But when a darkness from Ana’s past returns, she must face an impossible choice: does she protect a kingdom that wants her dead or save the Metal boy she loves?

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Have you read Heart of Iron? This was one of my Five Star Reads in 2018, and I am excited to do a reread! If you’ve read it, tell me your thoughts in the comments below!