First Line Friday: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Happy Friday!

I am currently reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.  

Excited to be cracking into my 2024 Backlist Reading Challenge and my Classics Club Challenge. And to be reading my first ever Shirley Jackson!  I know, I know, what have I been waiting for? 

Each Friday, Reading Is My SuperPower and Rose City Reader host first line link ups. And My Head is Full of Books hosts the Friday56. So today, I will be giving you a sneak peek into We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

 

GoodReads Description of We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson: Shirley Jackson’s beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family’s dark secret

Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. This edition features a new introduction by Jonathan Lethem.

First Lines: 

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.

From page 56: 

“Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea? 

Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me. 

Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep? 

Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!”

What book are you currently reading? Have you read We Have Always Lived in the Castle? Or others by Shirley Jackson? What did you think?