Great Openings: Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
It was a dumb thing to do but it wasn’t that dumb. There hadn’t been any trouble out at the lake in years. And it was so exquisitely far from the rest of my life.
from Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
Talk about a great hook: Sunshine, the eponymous protagonist and first-person narrator of McKinley’s first book for adults, immediately gets the reader invested in her story. She did something dumb, but not that dumb. And she did it to get away from her normal life.
In this opening paragraph, McKinley makes a clear contract with the reader: I’m immediately primed for a story in which the protagonist, without really knowing it herself, sets out to change her path. And, as in any good story, she gets into immediate and serious trouble as a result–trouble that will define her “new normal” by the end of the book.