Book Beginnings Friday and Friday's 56%

 

Book Beginnings on Friday is now hosted by Rose City Reader. 

The Friday 56 is hosted at Freda's Voice. 

Check out the links above for the rules and for the posts of the participants each week. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

MY BOOK BEGINNING:

They came on boats, on trains, great unceasing waves of them-the poor, the disenfranchised, the seekers, the dreamers. Second and third generations of farmers eking out an existence on scraps of farms divided up among too many sons. Political agitators no longer welcome in their homeland. Young men fleeing conscription in a king's army. Married couples starting out>. Bachelors from towns with few women. The poor from tenements with air so stifling and foul there was no room to breathe, let along dream.

56%

The horse picked its way slowly across the prairie, struggling through drifts up to its knees, but sometimes finding its footing easier where the snow had been swept by wind. It plodded toward  the homestead south of the school, the house growing bigger and bigger, but Raina was concentrating on the land they were gliding over, searching for anything-a mitten, a shawl, a slate. She didn't see any footprints in the snow, but that wasn't unusual, given the sweeping winds of the night before. But then, as they grew closer to the homestead, she did see something-she saw a pail, a lunch pain, sticking out of the snow, beckoning them.