Read Any Good Leads Lately?

 

When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.  My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress.  She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother.  Of course, she did. This was the day of the reaping.

                                                            –Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

 

The writer of an article, essay, story or book begins with a lead to draw the reader in–to make the reader want to read more.  Suzanne Collins opened her book with a lead that gave us information about the setting:  it was the day of the reaping, apparently a day that poor families had cause to dread.

In the comment section of this post, share an interesting lead to an article, essay, story or book you’ve read recently.  Be sure to include the author’s name and the title of the work.  See the first few comments for examples.  Try not to repeat a lead that has already been given.

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Image Credit:  The Hunger Games, Scholastic Press, 2008

102 thoughts on “Read Any Good Leads Lately?

  1. From The Lady of Bolton Hill by Elizabeth Camden:

    “Come on boy. Your dad needs you.”
    Daniel looked up from his exam in disbelief, certain his father would never pull him out of this test. But a grim-faced Joe Manzetti stood in the doorway of the classroom, trails of perspiration streaking through the soot on his face. Being summoned to fix the aging equiptment at the steel mill was a regular occurrence for Daniel, but it wasn’t going to happen today.

  2. This a the lead paragraph of the 1st book of my favorite series, Cherub by Robert Muchamore.

    James was due at the Basic Training compound at 5AM. He set an alarm and left it on his bedside table. Worrying about training kept him awake for ages. When he woke it was light. It’s never light at 5AM in November. This was bad.

  3. From The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan

    We only have a few hours so listen carefully. If you are hearing this story, you’re already in danger. Sadie and I might be your only chance.

  4. From Between Shades of Gray by: Ruta Sepetys

    THEY TOOK ME IN MY NIGHTGOWN.
    Thinking back, the signs were there–family photos burned in the fireplace, mother sewing her best silver and jewelry into the lining of her coat late at night, and papa not returning from work. My younger brother, Jonas, was asking questions. I asked questions, too, but perhaps I refused to acknowledge the signs. Only later did I realize that Mother and Father intended we escape. We did no escape.

    We were taken.

  5. From A wind in the door by: Madeline L’engle

    “There are dragons in the twin’s vegetable garden.” Meg Murry took her head out of the refrigerator where she had been foraging for an after-school snack, and looked at her six-year old brother. “What?”

  6. From Beowulf A New Telling by Robert Nye:

    Long ago there was no king in the land of the Danes, and they all wanted one. When a ship without sails or sailors came drifting in from sea, they went to meet it looking for a wonder, and sure enough there was a child in the ship.

  7. From- The Vampire Diaries, The Return: Shadow Souls
    Author: L.J. Smith

    “Dear Diary,” Elena whispered, “how frustrating is this? I left you in the trunk of the Jaguar and it’s two o’clock in the morning”. She stabbed her finger on the leg of her nightgown as if making a period. She whispered even more softly, leaning her forehead against the window, “And I’m afraid to go outside – in the dark – to get you. I’m afraid!”. She made another stab, and then feeling tears slip down her cheeks, reluctantly turned her mobile on to record. It was a stupid waste of battery, but she couldn’t help it, she needed this.

  8. From The Lying Game #4: Hide And Seek by Sarah Shepard

    I’d always thought the afterlife would be like an eternal stay at a resort on St.Barts- French waiters bringing me fruity drinks until the end of time, the azure Caribbean sky in a permanent sunset, a cool breeze tickling my forever tanned skin. It would be my reward for living a full, fabulous, long life.
    I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  9. A good lead I read recently read a good lead out of the book “The Help” By: Kathryn Stockett.

    “I walk into work with one thing on my mind . Today is the first day of December and while the rest of the United States is dusting off their manger scenes and pulling out their old stinky stockings, I’ve got another man i am waiting on. And it’s not Santy Claus and it’s not baby Jesus. It’s Mister Johnny Foote, Jr., who will learn that Minny Jackson is his maid on Christmas Eve.

  10. From- Pies & Prejudice By: Heather Vogel Fredrick

    “Jess stares at me in disbelief. ‘What do you mean you’re moving to England?’
    ‘It’s just for a year.’
    Her blue eyes well up with tears. “Just for a year! It might as well be forever!’
    I new breaking the news to my best friend would be hard, but I didn’t know it was going to be THIS hard.”

  11. From Savvy by Ingrid Law:

    Fish was looking at me expectantly. I was about to explain that I had to be the one to go wake Poppa. It was just that simple-my savvy was waking things up, just like Samson’s turtle. I knews that a savvy wasn’t something you could make happen for wanting, but I had proof that the means of waking Poppa up were there and wrapped up in me, ready to burst out like Rocket’s sparks or Fish’s wind and rain-If I could just find my way to Salina. I was about to tell my brother all of this, but that was when Will Junior found us.

  12. From the Fault in Our Stars by John Green:

    Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.

  13. From The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells:

    “No one would’ve believed that in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as man busied themselves with about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied-“

  14. this lead is from Delirium by Lauren Oliver

    It has been sixty-four years since the president and the consortium identified love as a disease, and forty-three years since the scientists have perfected a cure. Everybody else in my family has had the procedure already. My older sister, Rachel, has been disease free for nine years now. She’s been safe from love for so long, she says she can’t even remember its symptoms. I’m scheduled to have my procedure in exactly ninety-five days, on September 3rd. My birthday.

  15. From Crossed, by Ally Condie

    “I’m standing in a river. It’s blue. Dark Blue. Reflecting the color of the evening sky.”
    I don’t move. The river does. It pushes me against me and hisses through the grass at the water’s edge. “Get out of here,” the Officer says. He shines his flashlight on us from his position on the bank. “You said to put the body in the water,” I say choosing to misunderstand the officer.

  16. From Matched by Ally Condie
    Now that i’ve found the way to fly, which direction should I go into the night? My wings aren’t white or feathered; they’re green, made of green silk, which shudders in the wind and bends when I move-first in a circle, then in a line, finally in a shape of my own invention. The black behind me doesn’t worry me; neither to the stars ahead.

  17. I have 2 good leads that I read recently…

    From The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater:

    It is the first day of November and so, today, someone will die.

    From The Black Tatoo by Sam Enthoven:

    LONDON. The West End. A little after four in the morning. At the base of the skyscraper known as Centre Point Tower, in the darkness at the end of a dank concrete walkway, something stirred. The shadows there began to ripple and coalesce. The dark became a manlike shape of pure liquid black. Then the demon emerged, taking its first leisurely step towards the woman who stood there watching it.

  18. The lead for a great book which I recently read goes like this:

    “He began his new life standing up, surrounded by cold darkness and stale, dusty air.”
    -James Dashner, The Maze Runner, pg9

  19. This is a lead from The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien:

    In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort.

  20. Lead from :
    “The Fault in our Stars” by John Green,

    “Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided that i was depressed, presumably because i never left the house, slept a lot, read the same book over and over again, ate infrequently and spent an abundance of my free time thinking about death.”

  21. CHAPTER ONE : THE PURGE

    “There was a hint of wind coming over the top of the stone walls and through the barbed- wire sky on the day Alexander Stowe was to be purged.”

    The Unwanteds by Lisa McMann

  22. Lead from
    The “Seeds Of Rebellion” by Brandon Mull.

    “The prince entered the room. Repulsively sweet fumes pervaded the air. The mellow glow of scattered candles left most of the ancient carvings drenched in shadow. It had cost him much to reach this temple.”

  23. This is a lead to a chapter of Beautiful Darkness by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl;
    Darkness.
    I couldn’t see a thing, but I could feel the air draining out of my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. The air was full of smoke, and I was coughing, choking.

  24. Wither by Lauren Destefano:

    I WAIT. They keep us in the dark for so long that we lose sense of our eyelids. We sleep huddled together like rats, staring out, and dream of our bodies swaying.
    I know when one of the girls reaches a wall. She begins to pound and scream-there’s metal in the sound-but none of us help her. We’ve gone too long without speaking, and all we do is bury ourselves more into the dark
    The doors open.

  25. Paintings From The Cave by Gary Paulson:

    Sometimes you move right, sometimes left, in the dark, out of the light, always moving.
    You stop moving, you’re done.

  26. I have read a good lead in the book Found by Haddix and it made me want to keep reading to figure out what they were talking about. The lead is “It wasn’t there. Then it was.” I couldn’t figure out what they were talking about until I read on and I reccomend this great book to you.

  27. This is from “Eragon” by Christopher Paolini.

    Wind howled through the night, carrying a scent that would change the world. A tall shade lifted his head and sniffed the air. He looked human except for his crimson eyes.
    He blinked in surprise. The message had been correct: they were here. Or was it a trap? He weighed the odds, then said icily,”Spread out; hide behind the trees and bushes. Stop whoever is coming… or die.

  28. From Cherub by Robert Muchamore

    James Choke hated Combined Science. It should have been test tubes, jets of gas, and sparks flying all over the place, like he’d imagined when he was still at primary school. What he got was an hour propped on a stool watching Miss Voolt write on a blackboard. You had to write everything down even though the photocopier got invented forty years earlier.

  29. I have just started “Breaking Dawn” By Stephanie Meyer.

    I’d had more than my fair share of near-death experiences; it wasn’t something you ever really got used to. It seemed inevitable, though, facing death again. Like I really was marked for disaster. I’d escaped time and time again, but it kept coming back for me. Still, this time was so different from the others.

  30. From Carrie Jones’ book “Need”

    Everybody has fears right? I’m into that. I collect fears like other people collect stamps, which makes me sound more like a freak than I actually am. But I’m into it. The fears thing. Phobias. There are the typical, common phobias. Lots of people are afraid of heights and elevators and spiders. Those are boring. I’m a fan of the good phobias. Stuff like nelophobia, the fear of glass. Or arachibutyrophobia, the fear that you will have peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth.

  31. One good lead I’ve seen is one of the trailers for Halo4. You see your favorite A.I. from the previous games sitting on a rock, near tears, sating “I’ve been in service for eight years, A.I.s start degrading at seven.” and the action begins. This is definitely a strong start for the new game, and a very interesting lead.

  32. One of the best leads I have read was from “The Night Circus”, by Erin Morgenstern, which is a great book about a mysterious circus the arrives and opens at night, but disappears during the day. The lead is VERY good as it brings the reader right in. “The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday, it was not. Within black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breath-taking amazements. It is called La Cirque des Reves, and it is only open at night.”

  33. This book I am curentley reading starts of with a good lead, and I am hooked! It is called Deep Dark and Dangerous by Mary Downing Hahn. “I turned the photo over, hoping to find the girl’s name written on the back. There was Grandmother’s neat schoolteacherly handwriting: Gull Cottage 1977. Dulcie, Claire, and T-. Like her face, the rest of the girls name was missing. Alone in the attic, I stared at the arm and shoulder. T… Tanya, Tonia, Tracy, Terri. So many T names to choose from. Which one was hers?

  34. From “Silence” by Becca Fitzpatrick:

    Even before I opened my eyes, I knew I was in danger.

    I stirred at the soft crunch of footsteps drawing closer. A dim flicker of sleep remained, dulling my focus. I was flat on my back, a chill seeping through my shirt.

    My neck was crooked at a painful angle, and I opened my eyes. Thin stones loomed out of the blue-black fog. For a strange suspended moment, an image of crooked teeth came to mind, and then I saw them for what they really were. Gravestones.

  35. A good lead from the book “Shadows in Flight” by Orson Scott Card

    The starship Herodotus left Earth in 2210 with four passengers. It accelerated nearly to lightspeed as quickly as it could, and then stayed at that speed letting relativity do its work. On Herodotus, just over five years had passed; it had been 421 years on Earth. On Herodotus the thirteen-month-old babies had turned into six-year-olds, and the Giant had outlived his life expectancy by two years.

  36. From: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

    It was a dark and stormy night.
    In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating wraithlike shadows that raced along the ground.
    The house shook.

  37. From National Velvet by Enid Bagnold:

    “Unearthly humps of land curved into the darkening sky like the backs of browsing pigs, like the rumps of elephants. At night when the stars rose over them they looked like a starlit herd of divine pigs. The villagers called them Hullocks.
    The valleys were full of soft and windblown vegetation. The sea rolled at the foot of all as though God had brought his herd down to water.”

  38. The Son of Neptune: by Rick Riordan

    The snaked-Haired ladies were starting to annoy Percy. They should have died three days ago when he dropped a crate of bowling balls on them at the Napa Bargain Mart.

  39. Journey To The Center of the Earth- Jules Verne

    On the 24th of May, 1863, my uncle, Professor Lidenbrock, rushed into his little house, No. 19 Kronigstrasse, on of the oldest streets in the oldest portion of the city of Hamburg.

  40. From The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis:

    There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. His parents called him Eustace Clarence and his schoolmasters called him Scrubb. I can’t tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none.

  41. I read a good lead from the book “The Batboy”. In the lead it it felt like it was in slow motion. it was of those moments when Brian felt as if baseball was close for him to reach and touch.

  42. From Confectionately Yours by Lisa Papademetriou

    Those mean girls teased her for her clothes, her freckles—-even the fact that our parents were getting divorced. Chloe started to shrivel up under their words, like a plant that isn’t getting any water or light. It didn’t matter what I said, or what my mom said. It didn’t matter that we loved her. She tried to ignore them, but how could she? She was lonely.
    So she spent more and more time with her imaginary friend.
    I guess that’s why Mom and I are kind of freaking out that she’s got a new friend, maybe. A real friend.
    It’s just been so long.
    Oh, please. Please let this be a nice, normal friend.

  43. From ‘Magyk’
    By: Angie Sage

    Silas Heap pulled his cloak tightly around him against the snow. It had been a long walk through the Forest, and he was chilled to the bone. But in his pockets he had the herbs that Galen, the Physik Woman, had given him for his new baby boy, Septimus, who had been born earlier that day.

  44. “Are we rising again?” “No, on the contrary.” “Are we decending?””Worse than that captain! We are falling!” “For heaven’s sake heave out the ballast!” “There! The last sack is empty!” “Does the ballon rise?” “No!” “I hear a noise like the dashing of waves!” “The sea is below the car! It cannot be more than 500 feet from us!” “Overboard with every weight! … Everything!”

  45. This is a lead from the book The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien,

    In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

  46. This lead is from The Maze Runner by: James Dashner

    It starts out with a boy named Thomas and he does not know where he is. He has just awaken from a coma, and is lying on the ground. He has no remembrance from earlier in his life.

  47. Percy Jackson Series-Sea of Monsters

    My nightmare started like this. I was standing on a deserted street in some little beach town. A storm was blowing. Wind and rain rippled at the sidewalk.

  48. Lead from The Magicians Nephew (from the Chronicles of Narnia Series) by: C.S. Lewis

    The Wrong Door

    This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child. It is a very important story because it shows how all the comings and the goings between our own world and the land of Narnia began.

  49. Lead from “Anthem” by: Any Rand:

    IT IS A SIN TO WRITE THIS. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil. It is as if we are are speaking alone to no ears but our own.

  50. The Black Stallion by: Walter Farley

    The two men climbed out of the car and leaped onto the truck’s running board. Henry put the truck in gear as he saw Jake swing the gates open. Joe pushed his head in the open window near Henry . “made it,” he said. “Where do we go from here?” “Hold on tight, my friend. You’ll find out.” Henry said.

  51. The Throne Of Fire: by Rick Riordian

    look we dont have time for long introuductions. I need to tell this story quickly or we’re all going to die.

  52. Alex Rider: Snakehead: Anthony Horowitz

    Alex ride would never forget the feeling of impact,the first shock as the parachute opened and the second – more jolting still- as the module that had carried him back from outer space crashed into the sea.

  53. Reached, By: Ally Condie

    Every morning, the sun comes up and turns the earth red, and I think: This could be the day when everything changes. Maybe yoday the society will fall. Then night comes again and we’re all still waiting. But I know the Pilot’s real.

  54. The Demigod Diaries: by Rick Riordan

    My name is Luke.
    Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up with this diary. My life is pretty crazy. But I promised the old man I would try. After what happened today . . . well, I owe him.

  55. The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan

    My nightmare started like this. I was standing on a deserted night street in some little beach town. It was the middle of the nigh. A storm was blowing. Wind and rain ripped at the palm trees along the sidewalk.

  56. From Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling:
    Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.

  57. In the book ” A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle: It was a dark and stormy night. In her bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating wraithlike shadows that raced along the ground.

  58. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
    Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooges name was good upon ‘change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

  59. Gimmeacall by Sarah Mlynowski
    I should just return Brian’s watch to Nordstrom and go home. Instead, I’m sitting by the circular fountain in the Stonybrook Mall, starring at the window of the Sunrise Skin spa. It features a poster of a wrinkle-free women and the slogan Go Back In Time. Sounds good to me . If I could go back in time, there”s lots I’d tell my younger self.

  60. From the Gray Wolf Throne, the Third Book in he Seven Realms Series by Cinda Williams Chima.

    “Raisa ana’Marianna huddled in her usual dark corner at the Purple Heron, picking at her meat pie. She’d learned to stretch a mea and a mug of cider over an entire evening.
    It was risky to sit out in the common room of a tavern every night. Lord Bayar’s assassins would be searching for her. They’d failed to kill her at Oden’s Ford, thanks to Micah Bayar, Lord Bayar’s son. But the High Wizard’s spies could be anywhere, even here in the border town of Fetters Ford.”

  61. Angel by James Patterson

    I know he’ll come for me. He has to come for me. Fang wouldn’t let me die here.
    I’d been in the cage for days. I couldn’t remember eating. I couldnt remember sleeping. I was disoriented from all the tests and the needles and the acrid disinfectant smell that had permeated my entire childhood…growing up in a lab, as a expirement. And here i was again, disoriented but still capable of a blinding rage.
    Fang hadn’t come for me. I would have to save myself this time.

  62. “A Wrinkle In Time” by Madeleine L’Engle

    It was a dark and stormy night.
    In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating wraithlike shadows that raced along the ground.

  63. He began his new life standing up, surrounded by cold darkness and stale, dusty air.
    Metal ground against matal; alurching shudder shook the floor beneath him. He fell down at the sudden movement and shuffled backward on his hands and feet, drops of sweat beading on his forehead despite the cool air. Sinking to the floor, he pulled his legs up tight against his body, hoping his eyes would soon adjust to the darkness.

    From Maze Runner by James Dashner.

  64. Scorpia Rising by Anthony Horowitz

    The man in the black cashmere coat climberd down the steps of his private, six-seater Learjet 40 and stood for a moment his breath frosting in the chill morning air. He seemed to be alone. Ahead of him, a sign read Welcome to London’s City Airport , and beneath it an open door beckoned leading to immigration. He headed for it, completely unaware that he was being watched every step of the way.

  65. You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

  66. The Last Dogs: Dark Waters by Christopher Holt

    Max was running through a city.
    The street he ran down was long and empty. People had once swarmed the sidewalks on either side. They’d sat in glass bus shelters beneath advertisements of smiling men or women, or laughed as they went in and out of shops, arms loaded with colorful bags.

  67. “The snakes were starting to annoy Percy. They should have died 3 days ago when he dropped a crate of bowling balls on there heads at the napa bargain mart.”
    — Rick Riordan, The Son Of Neptune

  68. This is from The Knife Of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

    “The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say.”

    (There is no grammatical or spelling errors, the narrator talks like this)

  69. “I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and I tell you he’s the one. Or at least as close as we’re going to get.”

    -Ender’s Game by Orson Scottcard

  70. What if there was a 13th zodiac sign?
    You’re no longer Sagittarius, but Ophiuchus, the healer, the 13th sign.
    Your personality has changed. So has your mom’s and your best friend’s.
    What about the rest of the world?
    What if you were the one who accidentally unlocked the 13th sign, causing this world-altering change, and infuriating the other 12 signs?
    Jalen did it, and now she must use every ounce of her strength and cunning to send the signs back where they belong. Lives, including her own, depend upon it.
    This is the first page of one of my favorite books, “The 13th Sign” by Kristin O’Donnell Tubb

  71. This is from The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie

    “It was June of 1935 that I came home from my ranch in South America for a stay of about six months. It had been a difficult time for us out there. Like everyone else, we had suffered from world depression. I had various affairs to see to in England that I felt could only be successful if a personal touch was introduced. My wife remained to manage the ranch.
    I need hardly say that one of my first actions was to look up my old friend, Hercule Poirot.”

  72. between shades of gray: Ruta Sepetys

    THEY WORKED US hard on Christmas Day. I stumbled from fatigue, having no sleep the night before.

  73. From ‘House of Hades’ by Rick Riordan

    “During the third attack, Hazel almost ate a boulder. She was peering into the fog, wondering how it could be so difficult to fly across one stupid mountain range, when the ship’s alarm bells sounded.”

  74. “Until she met the exploding statue, Annabeth thought she was prepared for anything.”
    The Mark of Athena, Rick Riordan

  75. From Stephanie Meyer’s The Host:

    I knew it would begin with the end, and the end would look like death to these eyes. I had been warned.

  76. ” Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death. ”

    – The Fault in Ours Stars by John Green

  77. He had chosen hotel room very carefully.
    As he crossed the reception area toward the elevators, he was aware of everyone in the area around him.

    -Anthony Horowitz, “Russian Roulette- The story of an assassin.”

  78. The Hardy Boys Mystery of the Chinese Junk: Franklin W. Dixon

    “Joe look out! That launch will hit you!” Shouted Frank Hardy from the beach.

  79. “The last thing I wanted to do on my summer break was blow up another school. But there I was Monday morning, the first week of June, sitting in my mom’s car in front of Goode High School on East 81st.”

    -Rick Riordan, The Battle of The Labyrinth

  80. “TOM”
    No answer.
    “TOM!”
    No answer.
    “What’s gone on with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!”
    No answer.

    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain.

  81. The door starts shaking. It’s a flimsy thing made of bamboo shoots held together with tattered lengths of twine. The shake is subtle and stops almost immediately.

    -I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore

  82. I enjoy reading science fiction books, and specifically, if you’ve seen my blog, a lot of Star Wars. My all-time favorite author is Drew Karpshyn, writer of the Darth Bane trilogy. Another book he wrote was Annihalation, a story I finished recently. All of the books that Drew Karpshyn has written begin with describing the setting, but in a way that makes it a life threatening event if you don’t read on and find out what exactly is going on.

    Here is the lead from Annihalation: “Theron Shan walked quickly through the packed streets of Nar Shaddaa’s Promenade. His unassuming features-pale skin, brown bair, brown eyes, average build-allowed him to blend in easily with the crowd. Cybernetic implants around his left eye and right ear were his most distinguishing features.”

    This is one reason why I love Star Wars so much!

  83. Now that i’ve found the way to fly, which direction should I go into the night? My wings aren’t white or feathered; they’re green, made of green silk, which shudders in the wind and bends when I move-first in a circle, then in a line, finally in a shape of my own invention. The black behind me doesn’t worry me; neither to the stars ahead.

    – “Matched” by Allie Condie

  84. Massie, wiped the confused look off your face, massie’s mom, Kendra, said. “It’s simple-you’re not going”.

    -“The Clique” by Lisi Harrison

  85. The last thing I wanted to do on my summer break was blow up another school. But there I was Monday morning, the first week of June, sitting in my mom’s car in front of Goode High School on East 81st.

    -“The Battle of the Labyrinth” by Rick Riordan

  86. From The House of Hades by Rick Riordan

    “During the third attack, Hazel almost ate a boulder. She was peering into the fog, wondering how it could be so difficult to fly across one stupid mountain range, when the ship’s alarm bells sounded.”

  87. From Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

    “I’ve watched though his eyes, I’ve listened though his ears, and I tell you that he’s the one. Or at least as close as we’re going to get.”
    “That’s what you said about the brother.”
    “The brother tested out impossible. For other reasons. Nothing to do with his ability.”
    “Same with the sister. And there are doubts about him. He’s too malleable. Too willing to submerge himself in someone else’s will.”
    “Not if the other person is his enemy.”
    “So what do we do? Surround him with enemies all the time?”
    “If we have to.”
    “I thought that you said you liked this kid.”
    “If the buggers get him, they’ll make me look like his favorite uncle.”
    “All right. We’re saving the world. Take him.”

  88. From the alchemist by Michel Scott
    I am legend. Death has no claim over me,illness cannot touch me. Look at me now and it would be hard to put a age on me, and yet I was born in the year of our lord 1330, more than six hindered years ago.

  89. “My sister Rose lives on the mantelpiece. Well, some of her does. Three of her fingers, her right elbow and her kneecap are buried in a graveyard in London,”

    From My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher

  90. Cherub by Robert Muchamore.

    “James was due at the Basic Training compound at 5AM. He set an alarm and left it on his bedside table. Worrying about training kept him awake for ages. When he woke it was light. It’s never light at 5AM in November. This was bad.”

  91. Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood.

    If you’re reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now. Believe whatever lie your mom or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life.

    “The Lightning Thief” by Rick Riordan

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