Inkspell by Cornelia Funke

But the happiness remained in his heart, soft and warm like a young bird's downy plumage.

"Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several time?" Mo had said when , on Meggie's last birthday, they were looking at all her dear old books again. "As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells . . . and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower . . . both strange and familiar."

The whole secret, Meggie," Mo had once told her, "is in the breathing. It gives your voice strength and fills it with your life. And not just yours. Sometimes it feels as if when you take a breath you are breathing in everything around you, everything that makes up the world and moves it, and then it all flows into the words."

Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen

I probably wouldn't have told him about Mr. Finnegan or Uncle David or why the yard was such a mess if he hadn't asked me about moving. But since he had, well, I wound up telling him everything. And it felt like blowing a dandelion into the wind and watching all the little seeds float off, up and away.

Power Trip by Amanda Little

The article described [William Levitt] as foolishly overconfident: "At 43, the leader of the U.S. housing revolution is a cocky, rambunctious hustler with brown hair, cow-sad eyes, a hoarse voice (from smoking three packs of cigarettes a day), and a liking for hyperbole that causes him to describe his height (5 ft. 8 in.) as 'nearly six feet' and his company as the 'General Motors of the housing industry.'"

The best way to change the order of things, most believe, is not to complain that the old system doesn't work but to demonstrate the virtues of a new system. "Dr. King didn't build a movement by saying 'I have a complaint,'" said Van Jones.

The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg by Rodman Philbrick

He don't laugh that much, being a serious-minded person, but when he does, it feels like someone gave you a silver dollar, because it's bright and shiny and rings true.

Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

"If you take a book with you on a journey," Mo said when he put the first one in her box, "an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it . . . yes, books are like flypaper--memories cling to the printed page better than anything else." (p. 15)

It was dark, but the night was growing paler as if lifting her skirts a little way off to let the new morning appear. (p. 214)

Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver

I'm on a re-reading Barbara Kingsolver kick. This time I'm just lolling around in the metaphors.

The leaves shine like knife blades in the beam of his flashlight.

Men in uniforms decorated with the macho jewelry of ammunition.

And somehow Hallie thrived anyway--the blossom of our family, like one of those miraculous fruit trees that taps into an invisible vein of nurture and bears radiant bushels of plums while the trees around it merely go on living.

There are all the small things you love and despise about a parent: the disappointed eyes, the mannerisms, the sound of the voice as much as the meaning of the words, that add up to that singular thing--the way you are both going to respond, whether you like it or not.

She said, "You can't let your heart go bad like that, like sour milk. There's always the chance you'll want to use it later."

Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver

What a book! Reading this felt like bathing in metaphor upon metaphor.
The neighborhood tomcat, all muscle and slide, is creeping along the top of the trellis where Alice's sweet peas have spent themselves all spring.
Storm clouds with high pompadours have congregated on the western horizon, offering the hope of cooler weather, but only the hope.
Even a joke has some weight and takes up space, and when introduced into a vacuum, acquires its own gravity.
They are a planeload of people ignoring each other. Alice has spent her life in small towns and is new to this form of politeness, in which people sit for all practical purposes on top of one another in a public place and behave like upholstery.
Sympathizing over the behavior of men is the baking soda of women's friendships, it seems, the thing that makes them bubble and rise.
Kevin, the computer whiz, would say that Barbie is all output and no interface.
Please check out this amazing video from TED on metaphor.

Tangerine

Amazing, awesome, fantastic, magnificent. Have I used enough superlatives yet?

Great lead:

The house looked strange. It was completely empty now, and the door was flung wide open, like something wild had just escaped from it.

Details in lists:

I thought about my phone call to Mom. In Lake Windsor Downs, the people were inside, welcoming the freeze with hot cocoa and fake logs and Christmas CDs. In Tangerine, the people were heading out to fight it with shovels and axes and burning tires.

Strong Lead and Ending from Old Yeller by Fred Gipson

Lead:

We called him Old Yeller. The name had a sort of double meaning. One part meant that his short hair was a dingy yellow, a color that we called "yeller" in those days. The other meant that when he opened his head, the sound he let out came closer to being a yell than a bark.
I remember like yesterday how he strayed in out of nowhere to our log cabin on Birdsong Creek. He made me so mad a first that I wanted to kill him. Then, later, when I had to kill him, it was like having to shoot some of my own folks. That's how much I'd come to think of the big yeller dog.

Closing:

When finally I couldn't laugh and cry another bit, I rode on up to the lot and turned my horse in. Tomorrow, I thought, I'll take Arliss and that pup out for a squirrel hunt. The pup was still mighty little. But the way I figured it, if he was big enough to act like Old Yeller, he was big enough to start learning to earn his keep.

Emily Windsnap and the Monster from the Deep

by Liz Kessler

Sunny golden rays beamed into the room from the skylights all along the ceiling.

--suggested by Camila E. (5th Grade)

Wood Song by Gary Paulsen

Great lead:
I understood almost nothing about the woods until it was nearly too late.
Great ending:
Cookie, the leader, stopped before the arch and I had to drag her beneath it to finish--she was afraid of the crowd of people. I turned and could not keep from crying as I hugged my wife and son and then the dogs, starting from front to back, hugging each dog until two mushers took them away to put them on beds and I turned to the mayor of Nome who was there to greet me and said the one thing I never thought I would ever say.
"We'll be back to run it again."
And I knew that it was true.

Peter's Place by Sally Grindley

Beautifully written. Great for sentence fluency!

All along the wind-torn beaches, all the way up the ravaged cliff face, this land's end was full of life.
Guillemots, shags, kittiwakes, eider ducks, and long-tailed ducks screeched and squawked and gossiped to one another while in the turbulent ocean below, seals and otters bobbed and weaved and played and feasted on the sea's riches.
A passing oil tanker drew too close. Too close for the comfort of the playful seals; too close for the comfort of the cooing eiders; too close to miss the rocks that lay just below the rough tide. Too close to Peter's place.

Frindle by Andrew Clements

I am a slow-comer to this book, and I wish I'd added it to my read-aloud repetoire years ago!

Great Opening: If you asked the kids and the teachers at Lincoln Elementary School to make three lists--all the really bad kids, all the really smart kids, and all the really good kids--Nick Allen would not be on any of them. Nick deserved a list of all his own, and everyone knew it.

Nick was an expert at asking the delaying question--also known as the teacher-stopper, or the guaranteed-time-waster.

Mrs. Granger, champion of the forces of order and authority, is battling hundreds of young frindle-fighters.

Eyes of the Emporer by Graham Salisbury

Fascinating book about a part of WWII history I'd never heard of before.

Out to sea, the ocean breathed slow and soft, a body sleeping under silk.
Inland, fresh white clouds grew up out of the mountaintops.
He stopped and squinted at me, shadows from the tree spattered all over him.
Basic training was like swimming with barracudas--you were always on edge; somebody screaming in your face hour after hour, day after day.

How the Light Gets In

Although I didn't enjoy the ending, I loved the character development and the voice.

The Mercedes smells as though it has just come out of its plastic packet.
But within moments of closing my eyes, my brain springs open, like a flick-knife.
Flo is an example of a smudge; a dull, untidy mind containing bad copies of original thoughts.