The Translator by John Crowley

A beautifully written book about two lives colliding:  a Russian poet and his student at a Midwestern university.

It's always a surprise and wonderment when our plane breaks through a ceiling of cloud and, as though shedding some huge entangling dress of tattered lace, comes out naked into the naked blue sky and sun.

[The hotel] was vast, concrete and glass.  The rainy gulf was what it looked at or glowered at.

Her poem "The Split Level" would be about that; about a woman learning the names of flowers, and thus (she believes) coming closer to nature and really coming closer too, even though by means of the one thing nature doesn't possess of itself, its names.

This grief was something and not nothing, it rose continually to sweep over you, making you sob or cry out unexpectedly, to lose your footing even, like a riptide.

No rain fell that night on the University campus, but the leaves of all the trees, yellow elm and hickory, gray-green ash, coppery oak and beech, seemed to have fallen at once in the night:  long wind-combed rows of them moving in the still-restless air, dead souls lifted and tossed on gusts.
She whispered to herself okay, let's go, in that motherly or fatherly way we forever speak to ourselves so that we will do what we should or must.

A Horse of Her Own by Annie Wedekind

A tiny bit of a slow read--but I'm sure enthralling to anyone who loves to ride--about a girl who lives to ride, but knows she'll never be able to own her own horse.

Susan stalked the farm like a guard dog, yelping at and shepherding and instructing everything that came in her path.

Hush by Jacqueline Woodson

Amazing book about a father, a policeman, an African-American who does the right thing and turns in two policemen for shooting an African-American adolescent.  Following this, he and his family goes into the witness protection program and the book relates how the different family members cope wth their loss of identity.

The mother's dark brown fingers move quickly through a rise of white dough.

Look for the beauty, my mama says.  Always look for the beauty.  It's in every single body you meet.

Montmorency On the Rocks by Eleanor Updale

Detective novel set in turn-of-the century England full of aristocrats, commoners, and street people.  Considers addiction and sins of pride with great aplomb.

The sun seemed to spread cleanliness all around, picking out the detail of the ancient castle hundreds of feet up on its mysterious volcanic cliff.

Lucky by Rachel Vail

Not exactly a riches to rags story, but a riches to not-so-rich story.  Amazingly insightful writing about friendship dynamics in middle school.

Years ago we liked to imagine stuff together, adventures in her backyard or mine where we took turns being the tragically dying younger sister (she only has a younger brother) or back in time to prairie days (she'd been obsessed with the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which I couldn't get through at all; it just seemed like long stretches of weather punctuated by Pa making another chair).

Climbing the Stairs by Padma Venkatraman

The story of a girl who wants to go to college which takes place in India during WWII and the non-violent fight of India for independence from Britain.  The author grapples with a lot of issues:  non-violence vs. just war, women's rights, and education for all.

Great opening paragraph that sets the scene:

I still remember the day we celebrated Krishna Jayanthi, the festival of Lord Krishna's birth, at our home in Bombay.  The drive was drenched with the juice of fallen jamun fruit and the sand of Mahim beach gleamed like a golden plate in the afternoon sunlight.  Whispers of heat rose from the tar road and shivered toward the slumbering Arabian Sea.

Wringer: Not All Birthdays Are Welcome by Jerry Spinelli

Wringer is a must read for anyone dealing with peer pressure and trying to learn how to be yourself.

Lead:
He did not want to be a wringer.

THis thing, this not wanting to be a wringer, did it ever knock him from his bike?  Untie his sneaker lace? Call him a name?  Stand up and fight?
No.  It did nothing.  It was simply, merely there, a whisper of featherwings, reminding him of the moment he dreaded above all others, the moment when the not wanting to be a wringer would turn to becoming one.

Sights by Susanna Vance

A quirky novel about an accordian-playing, future-seeing, father-fleeing girl, who's named Baby Girl, and her mother.  A delight.

Lead:
I was in the womb eleven and a half months, came our fat, durable and gorgeous.  I've seen the newborn pictures:  smooth broad ears, a few sharp little teeth glinting like Chiclets.

Closing:
My past and future lives gathered in the dark, so many of them, I fell asleep counting.