First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

• Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
• Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
• Finally… reveal the book!

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Exactly one week before school started, Carissa Hayward broke up with me over chocolate-dipped soft-serve cones at the Dairy Queen three blocks from my house. We were supposed to spend senior year together.

by Dallas Woodburn
ASIN/ISBN: 9781953491305
Publication: February 8, 2022

The person who ruined their lives just might bring them together…

Brad is ready for a perfect senior year: he has a seat at the popular lunch table, a gig co-hosting the school’s morning announcements, and a gorgeous girlfriend. But when Carissa breaks up with Brad, his carefully constructed life comes crashing down. Convinced everything would be perfect if only Carissa would take him back, Brad creates a “self-improvement plan” and vows to re-win her heart.

Rose wishes she were having a normal senior year like everyone else, but leave it to her twin sister Carissa to butt in and ruin her life. Carissa secretly nominated Rose for the reality TV show Help Me Lose Weight and Live Again—and now Rose is on her way to Texas for three months of calorie-counting, marathon-exercising hell. Rose already felt overshadowed by her “perfect” sister, and collapsing on a treadmill on national TV is not making things any better. Plus, Rose can’t squash feelings for her sister’s boyfriend Brad (even though she knows he would never see her as anything but a friend.)

For fans of friends-to-lovers romance comes a heartwarming novel about self-improvement, identity and acceptance in our image-obsessed culture. (Goodreads)

Despite the whole wanting to date my sister’s ex, this was a book I enjoyed a lot. I really like Woodburn’s writing style. Do the first lines make you want to pick it up?