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 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!
Light came through the window, trickling morning all over the room. Tatiana Metanova slept the sleep of the innocent, the sleep of restless joy, of warm, white Leningrad nights, of jasmine June. But most of all, intoxicated with life, she slept the exuberant sleep of undaunted youth.
She did not sleep for much longer.
Continue to find out which book this extract is from…
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Goodreads synopsis
The golden skies, the translucent twilight, the white nights, all hold the promise of youth, of love, of eternal renewal. The war has not yet touched this city of fallen grandeur, or the lives of two sisters, Tatiana and Dasha Metanova, who share a single room in a cramped apartment with their brother and parents. Their world is turned upside down when Hitler’s armies attack Russia and begin their unstoppable blitz to Leningrad.
Yet there is light in the darkness. Tatiana meets Alexander, a brave young officer in the Red Army. Strong and self-confident, yet guarding a mysterious and troubled past, he is drawn to Tatiana—and she to him. Starvation, desperation, and fear soon grip their city during the terrible winter of the merciless German siege. Tatiana and Alexander’s impossible love threatens to tear the Metanova family apart and expose the dangerous secret Alexander so carefully protects—a secret as devastating as the war itself—as the lovers are swept up in the brutal tides that will change the world and their lives forever.
The Bronze Horseman is a Historical Fiction sub-classified as Adult Fiction, Cultural and Russia.
It is packed with emotion that will move you so much that, in my opinion, makes it hard to read this book (which is a first in a trilogy) in one go. One needs breaks and one needs to come to terms of how people survived in wars.
As someone who has not seen a war (the book is set in the backdrop of World War Russia) or ever been to Russia, a lot of the events in the book resulted in me self reflecting and digging deep at that.
This one, I highly recommend.
Here is a review I did once upon a time for the trilogy. Fair warning, it is a huge review but I will appreciate of you visit and leave your thoughts there.
Have you read this book?
If yes, what did you think of it?
Let me know in the comments!
Hina Loves To Read 