[hildea]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I much prefer being tossed into someone's world, and needing to find my own bearings.

Hm, trying to think of more books like that:

Tasha Suri: The Jasmine Throne

Someone important must have been killed in the night.

Priya was sure of it the minute she heard the thud of hooves on the road behind her. She stepped to the roadside as a group of guards clad in Parijati white and gold raced past her on their horses, their sabers clinking against their embossed belts. She drew her pallu over her face—partly because they would expect such a gesture of respect from a common woman, and partly to avoid the risk that one of them would recognize her—and watched them through the gap between her fingers and the cloth.

Ann Leckie: The Raven Tower

I first saw you when you rode out of the forest, past the cluster of tall, bulge-eyed offering stakes that mark the edges of the forest, your horse at a walk. You rode beside Mawat, himself a familiar sight to me: tall, broad-shouldered, long hair in dozens of braids pulled back in a broad ring, feathers worked in repoussé on gold, his dark gray cloak lined with blue silk.

(It takes quite some time before we understand who "I" is.)

Justina Ireland: Dread Nation
It starts with a prologue "In Which I Am Born and Someone Tries to Murder Me", and the prologue ends with:

And I suppose I might have grown up better, might have become a proper house girl or even taken Aunt Aggie’s place as House Negro. I might have been a good girl if it had been in the cards. But all of that was dashed to hell two days after I was born, when the dead rose up and started to walk on a battlefield in a small town in Pennsylvania called Gettysburg.

...and then the story starts seventeen years later.

Does anyone else have suggestions for books like that?