People have different criteria for judging whether a novel will make their top list of favorites. Sometimes, it’s the conclusion that shocks readers into storing that novel to memory, but occasionally, it’s the opening lines that you’ll remember forever. I know a book delivered if I can recall a character’s name or the opening lines even years later.

The following list of teen books have first lines compelling the reader to dive right in.

The Raven Boys

By Maggie Stiefvater

Spoken CD   |   Playaway   |   eBook   |   eAudiobook   |   hoopla eAudio

“Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she’d been told that she would kill her true love.”

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

By Ransom Riggs

Spoken CD   |   Graphic Novel   |   eBook   |   eAudiobook

“I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. The first of these came as a terrible shock and, like anything that changes you forever, split my life into halves: Before and After. Like many of the extraordinary things to come, it involved my grandfather, Abraham Portmann.”

Where Things Come Back

By John Corey Whaley

eBook

“I was seventeen years old when I saw my first dead body.”

Killing Mr. Griffin

By Lois Duncan

eAudiobook   |   hoopla eAudio

“It was a wild, windy, southwestern spring when the idea of killing Mr. Griffin occurred to them.”

Shallow Graves

By Kali Wallace

eAudiobook   |   hoopla eBook   |   hoopla eAudio

“The first time I killed a man it was an accident.”

Six of Crows

By Leigh Bardugo

eBook

“Joost had two problems: the moon and his mustache.”

Before I Fall

By Lauren Oliver

Spoken CD   |   eAudiobook   |   hoopla eBook   |   hoopa eAudio

“They say that just before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that’s not how it happened for me.”

Illuminae: The Illuminae Files

By Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

eBook   |   eAudiobook

“So here’s the file that almost killed me, Director.”

Ironside: A Modern Faery’s Tale

By Holly Black

eBook

“Human girls cry when they’re sad and laugh when they’re happy. They have a single fixed shape rather than shifting with their whims like windblown smoke. They have their very own parents, whom they love. They don’t go around stealing other girls’ mothers. At least that’s what Kaye thought human girls were like. She wouldn’t really know. After all, she wasn’t human.”

Going Bovine

By Libba Bray

eBook   |   eAudiobook

“The best day of my life happened when I was five and almost died at Disney World. I’m sixteen now, so you can imagine that’s left me with quite a few days of major suckage.”

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

By Jesse Andrews

eBook   |   eAudiobook   |   hoopla eBook

“So in order to understand everything that happened, you have to start from the premise that high school sucks. Do you accept that premise? Of course you do. It is a universally acknowledged truth that high school sucks. In fact, high school is where we are first introduced to the basic existential question of life: How is it possible to exist in a place that sucks so bad?”

Feed

By M.T. Anderson

eBook   |   eAudiobook   |   hoopla eBook

“We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.”