First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros: Dodger

Today I’m participating in First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, hosted by Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea, in which bloggers share a bit about a book they’re reading or planning to read soon.

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I have belayed audiobooks after listening to two in one week and then so many reviews to write last month. I had started Dodger a while back and then abandoned it, and I’m happy to say I’m listening to an audiobook again and I’m trying to work my way through it. Since I am listening, I might have cut the first paragraph shorter than it actually is.

Chapter 1

In which we meet our hero and a hero meets an orphan of the storm and comes face to face with Mr. Charlie, a gentlemen known as a bit of a scribbler.

The rain poured down on London so hard that it seemed that it was dancing spray. Every raindrop contending with its fellows, the supremacy in the air and waiting to splash down. It was a deluge. The drains and sewers were overflowing, throwing up, regurgitating as it were, the debris of muck, slime and filth, the dead dogs, the dead rats, cats and worse, bringing back up to the world of man all those things that they had thought they had left behind them. Jostling and gurgling and hurrying to the overflowing and always hospitable River Thames.

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Synopsis

A storm. Rain-lashed city streets. A flash of lightning. A scruffy lad sees a girl leap desperately from a horse-drawn carriage in a vain attempt to escape her captors. Can the lad stand by and let her be caught again? Of course not, because he’s…Dodger.

Seventeen-year-old Dodger may be a street urchin, but he gleans a living from London’s sewers, and he knows a jewel when he sees one. He’s not about to let anything happen to the unknown girl–not even if her fate impacts some of the most powerful people in England.

From Dodger’s encounter with the mad barber Sweeney Todd to his meetings with the great writer Charles Dickens and the calculating politician Benjamin Disraeli, history and fantasy intertwine in a breathtaking account of adventure and mystery.

Beloved and bestselling author Sir Terry Pratchett combines high comedy with deep wisdom in this tale of an unexpected coming-of-age and one remarkable boy’s rise in a complex and fascinating world.

 

Would you keep reading?