First Line Friday #101
Today’s First Line Friday is a book that has been featured on the site a few times. Kim reviewed Jagged Mind by Taylor Saville here where she was featured in an author spotlight. Jagged Mind also made Kim’s Top 10 of 2018.
I must share a **trigger warning** for self harm before I share the first few lines of Jagged Mind. This is a dark novel that deals with many vices, so it will not be for everyone:
What makes someone want to destroy themselves? What crosses over in the brain, enabling them to associate pain with comfort? To place a blade to the flesh, watch it tear open, feel the sharpness, and see the flood of red that follows – to experience that and to have it act as a release, is something few can grasp… The inner turmoil cascading within is something no one on the outside can understand, not unless they’ve lived it, because self-hate is a disease. One with no easy cure.
Is there any true deliverance for the depraved? Does love change people? These questions surround the life of Harper Nolan. The foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, self-destructive lead singer of the metal band known as Jagged Mind. Locked in a cycle of self-mutilation, violence, and alcohol abuse, the threads of his life slowly begin to unravel, much to the unease of his more levelheaded bandmates. Though right when his world is ready to collapse entirely from beneath his feet, he falls harder than he ever could have imagined for the naive, sheltered girl who changes everything. He believes her love can save him, when in reality, she is merely the flame which detonates the bomb, sending their lives spiraling into a nightmare too intense to fathom. A nightmare which leaves him convinced he must end his own life. Though to his horror… life refuses to let him go.