Friday Firsts – Phantom Pains by Mishell Baker

Friday Firsts is a new meme that will run every Friday here on Tenacious Reader. It will feature the first few sentences/paragraph of my current book and my first impressions as well. It’s meant to be a quick and easy way to share a bit about what I am reading, and I would love to hear others join in sharing their current reads as well.

** If you haven’t read Borderline: there are spoilers for that book in this quote so I recommend skipping down to my impressions below as well as checking out my review for Borderline. ** 

Here’s the thing about PTSD: it doesn’t understand the rules. When I was seven, for example, I stepped in a nest of fire ants and ran screaming for two blocks, so crazed with pain and panic I didn’t notice I’d run over a broken bottle until I saw the smears of red on my front steps. And yet I still spent every summer barefoot after that, at least until I got drunk at twenty-five and lost both feet in a seven-story fall.
Then there was that time I choked the life out of a bloodsucking mantis-woman who’d just killed two of my friends. Like I said, PTSD doesn’t know the rules, so I slept like a baby afterward. And yet somehow, four months later, when I picked up the office phone at Valiant Studios and heard the voice of a nineteen-year-old warlock, I turned into a sweating iceberg at my desk.
“Millie? Are you there?” Caryl Vallo said. That voice, that impossible middle-aged rasp that made you forget she couldn’t buy beer. She sounded calm, so she must have had her familiar out. He was probably perched on her shoulder, tail wrapped amiably around her neck as she cradled the phone to her ear with a gloved hand.

• Quote taken from ARC, may differ from finished copy

My First Impressions

Oh, I really enjoyed the first one and this intro quickly pulls me back in to Millie’s life. I like that there are story refreshers in it to help bring me back up to speed on the characters as well as what happened in book 1. Millie is a fun character to read, and so far it looks like that hasn’t changed.

What are you reading right now? Did it start out strong? Feel free to share in the comments!