First Chapter ~ First Paragraph Tuesday Intros is a weekly meme hosted by Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea. It's an opportunity to share the first paragraphs of a book I am currently reading or planning to read sometime soon.
This week I'm featuring the opening paragraphs from The Execution of
Read on after the intro for my Tuesday Teaser.
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Publication date: 6/11/2013
"In this world, you are either good or evil. If not, then a court or a teacher or a parent is bound to tag your identity before you've had a chance to figure it out on your own. The gray middle ground, that mucous-thin terrain where most of life resides, is really only a temporary annex, like gestation or purgatory. It shadows over everyone in its vacuous and insipid cape, flying across the sky, making smoke letters out of your fears. You always know it's up there, but you never quite know how to get rid of it. It waits for you, patiently, until the day it wraps you in its cyclone and you can no longer vacillate between black and white, artist or scientist, teacher or student. It is this point at which you must choose one way of life or the other. Victor or victim. And when you do, the fear drips away as seamlessly as a river drains into an ocean. For me, it happened on January 1, 2003.
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My name is Noa P. Singleton. I am thirty-five years old and I reside in the Pennsylvania Institute for Women. My identification number is 10271978. I am the only child of Miss Teenage California 1970 and a weeklong sperm donor whose name my mother claimed she couldn't recall. I was salutatorian for my high school, where I ran varsity track and wrote for the school newspaper, investigating the illicit and often extensive use and sale of drugs on campus. I studied biochemistry and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and have worked as a restaurant hostess, roller rink waitress, substitute teacher, math tutor, and laboratory research assistant. I can recall with faint hyperbole the moment I took my first steps. I've had one serious boyfriend. The trial that led me to you lasted only five days, though the jury deliberated for another four. It took only a handful of additional jury pools to select the twelve individuals who were to sentence me to death five short months following my trial. Their names are now embossed in my memory, along with my grandmother's scent (mothballs and jewelry cleaner), my first boyfriend's habitual post-coital cigarette, and the feeling of the Latin letters from my high school diploma raised against my thumb."
What do you think? Would you continue reading? There's been so much buzz about this book and I've seen it on several must-read new book lists. For these reasons, it's on my summer reading list and I hope to get to it sooner rather than later.
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Teaser Tuesdays, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading,
is a weekly event where bloggers open to a random page and share a
teaser from somewhere on that page--no spoilers allowed.
Here's my teaser from The Execution of Noa P. Singleton by Elizabeth L. Silver:
"'Look, I want to help you, Noa,' she said, her voice slipping. 'I want to talk to the governor about you. But if I'm going to use my influence to speak with the governor and tell him that, as the victim's mother, I cannot live with this execution, I need something--anything--from you that tells me that you have changed.'" ~p.19
Catherine
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First Chapter ~ First Paragraph #18 and Tuesday Teaser was originally published by
Catherine for bookclublibrarian.com. This post cannot be
republished without attribution.
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