Book Beginnings and Friday 56

I am again participating in two book blog memes today. I hope that they are used for children’s books as well as adult fiction! The first meme is Book Beginnings on Fridays, hosted by Rose City Reader, who asks us to:

Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

The ebook I am reading is Kate Milford’s Ghosts of Greenglass House, a children’s book due to be published in the UK by Clarion Books on 13 November 2017. Please bear in mind that I am reading the proof copy, so I suppose it is possible that the book’s opening could be amended before publication. This is how the book begins:

Frost was pretty much the worst. It was like a promise with nothing behind it. It was like not enough icing on a cookie, not enough butter on toast. It was like the big gilt-framed antique mirror in his parents’ bedroom: from a distance it was shiny and beautiful, but once you got close enough, you could see the plain old every-day wood peeking through the gold paint. Frost, at least when you wanted snow, was about as disappointing as anything in this world had a right to be – assuming you figured things had a right to be disappointing. Milo Pine wasn’t feeling that generous at the moment.

My initial reaction to this opening is that the writer is not from the UK and the words ‘cookie’ and ‘figured’ have me assume, provisionally, that this book is set in America – the US or possibly Canada. So I am keen to read on to discover the book-setting. The introduction also reminds me of how strongly I wished for snow when I was young, so it feels to me like an authentic beginning to a children’s book, and I  want to know more about Milo and whether there is a specific reason why he is so disappointed to see frost rather than snow.

Turning to the second meme, Friday 56 hosted by Freda’s Voice, the rules are: ‘Grab a book, any book. Turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader. (If you have to improvise, that’s ok.)  Find any sentence (or few, just don’t spoil it). Post it.’

Moving ahead to page 56, Milo is reading in bed:

‘Milo took the book to his bed and got back under the covers.

There was a city that could not be mapped, and inside it a house that could not be drawn. It stood at the bottom of a hill on a street called Fellwool, a lane with broken pavement that had been overgrown and mostly hidden by ancient, knotty pines. It was the kind of house that, in simpler times, might have been called enchanted or haunted or cursed.’

This is intriguing, especially as page 56 also hints that answers to unknown situations Milo is facing may be found in this mysterious book…

Both excerpts that I have shared leave me wanting to find out more – in combination with the book title and the gorgeously illustrated book cover, I definitely look forward to reading this book. What do you think?