First Lines Fridays | 9th of June 2023

Hello Hello! How are you?

Today I’m bringing you another FLF post! I was going to alternate between First Lines Fridays and Down the TBR Hole posts every other Friday, but I’ve been really busy this week so decided to write another FLF post instead!

And I’m really excited about this book, so keep on reading to see which one I’m featuring today!

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!

12 Hours.

You are a fingerprint.

When you open your eyes on the last day of your life, you see your own thumb. In the jaundiced prison light, the lines on the pad of your thumb look like a dried-out riverbed, like sand washed into twirling patterns by water, once there and now gone.

The nail is too long. You remember that old childhood myth — how after you die, your nails keep growing until they curl around your bones.

But what book is this quote from?

Notes on an Execution by Danny Kukafka

Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he’s done, and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls, years ago. But Ansel doesn’t want to die; he wants to be celebrated, understood. He hoped it wouldn’t end like this, not for him.

Through a kaleidoscope of women—a mother, a sister, a homicide detective—we learn the story of Ansel’s life. We meet his mother, Lavender, a seventeen-year-old girl pushed to desperation; Hazel, twin sister to Ansel’s wife, inseparable since birth, forced to watch helplessly as her sister’s relationship threatens to devour them all; and finally, Saffy, the homicide detective hot on his trail, who has devoted herself to bringing bad men to justice but struggles to see her own life clearly. As the clock ticks down, these three women sift through the choices that culminate in tragedy, exploring the rippling fissures that such destruction inevitably leaves in its wake.

Blending breathtaking suspense with astonishing empathy, Notes on an Execution presents a chilling portrait of womanhood as it simultaneously unravels the familiar narrative of the American serial killer, interrogating our system of justice and our cultural obsession with crime stories, asking readers to consider the false promise of looking for meaning in the psyches of violent men.

I’ve been seeing this book on social media for months now and I love anything weird and criminal like this, especially since it seems really unique and almost unsettling. I bought it when I was on my honeymoon in Scotland and started it on the plane, so I already know that I like it, I just have to pick it up again and continue it!!

That’s all for now, I hope you enjoyed reading this post.

See you soon, stay safe,

Ellie xx