Fantastic First Sentences

Fantastic First Sentences for the First Month of the Year!

by Lauren Fox

Have you ever read the first sentence of a book and it was so good you had to keep going? Check out these great first sentences from children’s and young adult books. If one of them intrigues you, click the sentence to go to the catalog and see what the book is! From there, you can put it on hold so you can borrow it and read the rest.

Children’s Books:

1. The robot had a mind of its own.
2. Somewhere in the Américas, many years after once-upon-a-time and long before happily-ever-after, a boy climbed the cobbled steps of an arched bridge in the tiny village of Santa Maria, in the country of the same name.
3. The Camp Rockaway brochure promised every kid was a rock star waiting to happen, but they never met me.
4. The first person I saved was a dog.
5. Some people are meant to shine.
6. Rendi was not sure how long the moon had been missing.
7. At the top of the key, I’m MOVING & GROOVING, POPping and ROCKING – Why you BUMPING?
8. When you know what I know, you’ll wish you didn’t.
9. On the eve of the Lunar New Year, the demons invaded.
10. Things need to get ugly before they can get better.
11. You’d think monsters would have their own grocery story, but they don’t.

Young Adult Books:

1. The world is not tame.
2. When I awake, I am eye-level with a puddle of beet juice soaked into the carpet, soft fibers cushioning my cheek.
3. Hannah calls it “a state of becoming,” but most people would probably call it chaos.
4. I’ve never had a mother, but I’ve always had the trees.
5. I am haunted at times by Sung Kim’s varsity jacket.
6. This was the secret Hanako felt about old people: she really didn’t understand them.
7. On a scale of one to ten, my desire to talk to the cops who’ve spent the last twenty minutes digging through my locker is a raging negative fifty.
8. The best day of my life happened when I was five and almost died at Disney World.
9. It’s in the stretches of silence that I wonder if she’s dead.
10. It has been sixty-four years since the president and the Consortium identified love as a disease, and forty-three since the scientists perfected a cure.
11. Don’t nobody believe nothing these days which is why I haven’t told nobody the story I’m about to tell you.