First Lines Friday...

All the dying that summer began with the deaht of a child, a boy with golden hair and thick glasses, killed on the railroad tracks outside New Bremen, Minnesota sliced into pieces by a thousand tons of steel speeding across the prairie toward South Dakota. His name was Bobby Cole, He was a sweet-looking kid and by that I mean he had eyes that seemed full of dreaming and he wore a half smile as if he was just about to understand something you'd spent an hour trying to explain.
                                     ... Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger


I was hearing a lot of buzz about This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger and saw that this was not his first book. In fact, William Kent Krueger has an award winning mystery series with #17 having been published in 2018. But Ordinary Grace and This Tender Land were not mysteries, but were literary fiction, coming-of-age novels. As I read the sample of Ordinary Grace I was struck by the easy going readability, the really good story writing and decided he was someone I needed to read. This Tender Land is on my TBR list, but Ordinary Grace is on my nightstand now. Published by Atria Books in 2014.