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.