First Lines

Catching up on e-mail after our week-long trip to New York. Here's a good find from mom: a mention of Samurai Shortstop on a librarian's blog called Proper Noun. The topic of the post was "First Lines." Here's what she had to say about Samurai:

Last year at the AASL conference, I was watching an author panel and someone brought up beginnings. First lines, specifically. One of the authors, I can’t remember who now, mentioned that when writing for teens, the goal is for the first sentence of the book make the reader ask “why?”

I thought of that as I picked up Samurai Shortstop and glanced at the first page. It opens: “Toyo watched carefully as his uncle prepared to kill himself.” It definitely piqued my curiosity.

Here's the link.