Friday Firsts: Girls of Paper and Fire – Natasha Ngan
Friday Firsts is a meme that runs every Friday on Tenacious Reader. It will feature the first few sentences/paragraph of the book I’m currently reading and my first impressions. I first spotted this meme when it was first launched and it has taken me way too long to finally join in, but here it is! Enjoy!
The book: Girls of Paper and Fire by Natasha Ngan
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: November 6th, 2018
Pages: 380
ARC? No
There is a tradition in our kingdom, one all castes of demon and human follow. We call it the Birth-blessing. It is such an old, deep-rooted custom that it’s said even our gods themselves practiced it when they bore our race onto the earth. When babies die before their first year, there are whispers like leaves fluttering darkly on the wind: the ceremony was performed too late; the parents must have spoken during it; the shaman who executed the blessing was unskilled, a fake.
Coming from the lowest caste – Paper caste, fully human – my parents had to save for the full nine months after the news of my mother’s pregnancy. Though I’ve never seen a Birth-blessing ceremony, I’ve imagined my own so many times that it feels almost like a memory, or some half remembered dream.
Picture smoke-cut night and darkness like a heave black hand cupped round the world. Crackling fire. Standing before the flames – a shaman, his leathery skin webbed with tattoos, teeth sharpened to wolflike points. He’s bent over the naked form of a newborn, just hours old. She’s crying. On the other side of the fire, her parents watch in silence, hands clasped so tightly their knuckles are white. The shaman’s eyes roll as he chants a dao, painting its characters in the air with his fingers, where they hang above the baby, glowing softly before fading away.
As he comes to the crest of the prayer, a wind picks up. The grass stirs in a feathery rustle. Faster and faster the shaman chants, and louder and louder the rustle of the wind, until the fire whips upward, a whorl of orange-red flame dancing high into the sky before suddenly flashing out.
Blackness.
The starlit night.
Then the shaman reaches into the air where the fire had been for the object floating in its wake: a small, egglike golden pendant. But the pendant isn’t what’s important. What’s important is what the pendant hides within.
The baby’s fate. My fate.
First impressions:
First of all: that cover is amazing! I absolutely love it. I’m really excited to read this book because it seems like a very emotional story. I hope the author has handled the very difficult theme of violence and sexual assault well. The introductory section above is definitely a good start to the book. It sets the tone. I’m curious to see how these people in different castes live together and how the world works. I also want to know what was in the pendant!
