Welcome, everyone, to my very first Friday Fragments post. This is where I will join in on three Friday blog memes. The first is First Line Friday, hosted by Carrie over at Reading is my Super Power. For this, you post the first line of the book nearest you. The second is Book Beginnings, which is hosted by Gilion over at Rose City Reader. For this one you share the opening sentence or two of a current, previous, or upcoming read, or any other book you want to highlight. And finally, there’s Friday56, hosted by Anne at My Head is Full of Books. For this you pick any book you want and post a (non-spoiler!) snippet from page 56, or 56% for digital books. I always have multiple books on the go, though, so I’m going to add a personal rule for myself: I have to use a different book for each of the three memes; no doubling up.

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First Line Friday

In June of 1900 Jimmie Blacksmith’s maternal uncle Tabidgi — Jackie Smolders to the white world — was disturbed to get news that Jimmie had married a white girl in the Methodist church at Wallah.

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Jimmie Blacksmith is desperate to figure out where he belongs. Half-Anglo and half-Aboriginal, he feels out of place in both cultures. Schooled in the ways of white society by a Protestant missionary, Jimmie forsakes tribal customs, adopts the white man’s religion, marries a white woman, and seeks a life of honest labour in a world Aborigines are normally barred from entering. As he tries to survive between two cultures, he will always be seen as less than human by the employers who cheat and exploit him, the fellow workers who deride him, and the wife who betrays him—and a man can only take so much. Driven by hopelessness, rage, and despair, Jimmie commits a series of savage and terrible acts of vengeance and becomes something he never thought he’d a murderer, a fugitive, and ultimately, a legend. Based on shocking real-life events.
(description from Goodreads)

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Book Beginnings

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

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An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest both ran simultaneously to packed houses until Oscar Wilde was arrested on charges of practising homosexuality in April 1895. Since then the plays have never failed to delight audiences, and are a lasting testimony to their author’s wit and theatrical genius.

Treachery, blackmail, theft, and above all, self-interest abound in An Ideal Husband, the first drawing-room comedy to address political sleaze. In Wilde’s more light-hearted masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, nothing is sacred. Wilde’s dazzling barbed epigrams are directed at all that English high-society holds dear. ‘The only pure verbal opera in English’ (WH Auden), this play presents some of the most celebrated comic scenes in English drama.
(description from The Storygraph)

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Friday56

A Chinese city, no matter how poor or backward, was always hustling and bustling. It demonstrated the quintessential, irrepressible spirit of entrepreneurship. Nanjing in 1946 was no exception.

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Born near the beginning of World War II, Li Na was the youngest son of a wealthy Chinese government official. By the time he was twenty-one, he had witnessed enough hardship, hope, and tremendous change to last a lifetime. Li saw his family’s fortunes dashed when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists came to power in 1945, transforming his father from a powerful official to a prisoner jailed for treason. He survived a year in a dangerous Nanjing slum and watched from his aunt’s Shanghai apartment as the Communist army marched in and seized the city in 1948. He experienced both the heady materialism of the decadent foreign “white ghosts” in British Hong Kong and the crippling starvation within the harsh confines of a Communist reform school. He went from being Li Na—the dutiful Chinese son yearning for a harsh, manipulative father’s love—to Charles, an independent Chinese American seeking no one’s approval but his own. Lyrical and luminous, intense and extraordinary, The Bitter Sea is an unforgettable tale of one young man and his country.
(description from Goodreads)

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© Adele Walker October 2025