Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

Lead:  It is my first morning of high school.  I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache.

I need a new friend.  I need a friend, period.  Not a true friend, nothing close or share clothes or sleepover giggle giggle yak yak.  Just a pseudo-friend, disposable friend.  Friend as accessory.  Just so I don't feel and look so stupid.

The cement-slab sky hangs inches above our heads.  Which direction is east?  It has been so long since I've seen the sun, I can't remember.  Turtlenecks creep out of bottom drawers.  Turtle faces pull back into winter clothes.  We won't see some kids until spring.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie

I love his writing, but the alcoholic-ridden stories get me down after a while.

I was a victim of a high school high school basketball form of Post-Traumatic Free-Throw Stress Syndrome.

Leads and Endings in a short story:

Lead: Although it was winter, the nearest ocean four hundred miles away, and the Tribal Weatherman asleep because of boredom, a hurricane dropped from the sky in 1976 and fell so hard on the Spokane Indian Reservation that it knocked Victor from bed and his latest nightmare.

Ending: But it was over.  Victor closed his eyes, fell asleep.  It was over.  The hurricane that fell out of the sky in 1976 left before sunrise, and all the Indians, the eternal survivors, gathered to count their losses.

Shoot the Moon by Billie Letts

And like carriers of a virus, those who heard passed it on to others, causing an epidemic of gossip to spread from neighbor to neighbor, child to parent, doctor to patient, friend to friend.

Sweeping Up Glass

Lead:  The long howl of a wolf rolls over me like a toothache.

While I love that boy more than life, Ida's a hole in another sock.

Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos

Lead:  My fall from suburban grace, or, more accurately, my failure to achieve the merest molehill of suburban grace from which to fall, began with a dinner party and a perfectly innocent, modestly clever, and only faintly quirky remark about Armand Assante.

Ending:  I stand here on this spring day in the center of my life.  Chaos, din, and beauty.  For a moment, I am still.  Then "Cornelia" cuts across the noise, and because one of them is calling me, I go.

What Dev would figure out very soon thereafter was that all that bluster and drama, that bad imitation of Robin Williams in one of his inspiring-mentor rolls stemmed from the fact that Mr. Trip was a self-important, histrionic, humorless jerk.  A class A windbag.

It was Saturday, the kind of tricky October Saturday that contains equal parts hot sun and cool air, so that you keep taking off your sweatshirt and putting it back on, taking off, putting on until, pretty soon laughing at yourself.

"Hospice," a strangely delicate, weightless word, Piper noticed, one that could be either whisper or hiss.

He could see how you could get used to the not-thinking, the haphazard floating through days, your brain lounging around like a tourist in a loud shirt, grasping nothing heavier that a magazine and a drink (umbrellaed, water beaded, pineapple hanging off its rim like an elephant ear), lulled by the sound of seagulls and ocean waves.

I Had Seen Castles by Cynthia Rylant

The bombs that dropped on Hawaii sent a shock wave straight into the outraged soul of every man in American, and like Neanderthals, we had a primitive, fearless, screaming desire to kill.

After the Nazis decimated our pitiful army a few times with their monstrous panzer tanks and eighty-millimeter guns, it occurred to us that we were--as we had known from the start, but not until now so cruelly--in very serious trouble.

In the window of the barbershop a few blocks from our house was a crudely lettered sign that read, No Yellow Bellies, Skunks, or COs Allowed, and that sums up pretty well the sentiment of most people toward any able-bodied young men who had no stomach for killing.

The Red Pony by John Steinbeck

In the gray quiet mornings when the land and the brush and the houses and the trees were silver-grey and black like a photograph negative, he stole toward the barn, past the sleeping stones and the sleeping cypress tree.

The pony's tracks were plain enough, dragging through the frostlike dew on the young grass, tired tracks with little lines between them where the hoofs had dragged.

When the peaks were pink in the morning they invited him among them:  and when the sun had gone over the edge in the evening and the mountains were a purple-like despair, then Jody was afraid of them; then they were so impersonal and aloof that their very imperturbability was a threat.

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Sentences that make you wonder:

She had not learned the art of silent crying; she had not needed to.

There is not only a shabbiness about it all, but it is a resigned shabbiness--there is no attempt to conceal, to plant bright hibiscuses to draw the eyes away from the moldy walls.

First Poison Ivy Award

John Sanford's Rough Coutry may be popular in the adult easy-reading mystery set, but this man knows how to misuse a colon.  I kept coming to a standstill when reading his book.  Here are two examples.  How do you think they could have been written better?

Virgil did: like it.

But: she was deep with Wendy.

Kat, Incorrigible by Stephanie Burgis

Lead:

I was twelve years of age when I chopped off my hair, dressed as a boy, and set off to save my family from impending ruin.

Ending:

I was twelve years of age when I cut my hair short, became a highwayman, and captured husbands for both of my sisters.
I could hardly wait to find out what would happen next.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

It was as black in the closet as old blood.

As I approached from the west, the mellow old stone glowed like saffron in the late afternoon sun, well settled into the landscape like a complacent mother  hen squatting on her eggs, with the Union Jack stretching itself contentedly overhead.

The Navigator of New York by Wayne Johnston

Uncle Edward seemed generally aloof, sceptical, as if his vocation and his character had blended, and he viewed all things with diagnostic objectivity, forever watching and keeping to himself a horde of observations, his expression hinting at a shrewdness he could not be bothered demonstrating.

Barbara Kingsolver--How does she do it?

She knew her own recklessness and marveled, really, at how one hard little flint of thrill could outweigh the pillowy, suffocating aftermath of a long disgrace.

She frowned at the November sky.  It was the same dull, stippled ceiling that had been up there last week, last month, forever.  All summer.  Whoever was in charge of weather had put a recall on blue and nailed up this mess of dirty white sky like a lousy drywall job.

Beyond the fence an ordinary wildness of ironweed and briar thickets began.

Taking the High Road to damnation; the irony had failed to cross her mind when she devised this plan.

The trail was a cobbled mess of loose rocks, and it ran straight uphill in spots, so badly rutted she had to grab saplings to steady herself.

The path steered out of the shadow into a bright overlook on the open side of the slope, and here she slammed on her brakes; here something was wrong.

She paled at the size her foolishness had attained, how large and crowded and devoid of any structural beams.

Her eyes still signaled warning to her brain, like a car alarm gone off somewhere in an empty parking lot.  She failed to heed it, understanding for the moment some formula for living that transcended fear and safety.  She only wondered how long she could watch the spectacle before turning away.  It was a lake of fire, something far more fierce and wondrous than either of those elements alone.  The impossible.

A life measured in half dollars and clipped coupons and culled hopes flattened between uninsulated walls.

They all attended Hester's church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.

Lying on his back, he resembled a mountain:  highest in the midsection, tapering out on both ends.

Summer's heat had never really arrived, nor the cold in its turn, and everything living now seemed to yearn for sun with the anguish of the unloved.

A lifting brightness swept the landscape, flowing up the mountainside in a wave.

He won people over in a different way, using his hands to push and pull his congregants as if kneading dough and making grace rise.

We all have a special talent of believing in a falsehood, and believing it devoutly, when we want it to be true.

Cordie had skipped her nap and was tromping around the living room with her boots half off, emitting a volcanic eruption of demands, spit, and tears.

He was impressed with all celebrity in equal measure, the type of kid who had cut out pictures of football players, Jesus, and America's Most Wanted to tape on his bedroom wall.

Valia had no opinions of her own, apologized to her shadow, and did exactly as she was told, all of which signed her on as Hester's BFF.

She knew Crystal wanted something; the girl was permanently set on intake mode.

At last the bus crested the hill, moving toward them like a golden cruise ship in its broad, square majesty.

He popped out the door like a prize from a gumball machine, ablaze in his yellow hooded slicker and a smile so wide his face looked stretched.

Even as close as they were, how could she really understand a household where information had to be absorbed like shrapnel:  movie, sitcom, ultimate wrestling, repeat.

She tried to hold on to anger but felt it being swamped by a great sadness that was rising in her like the groundwater in her yard.

Everything she ever word was sized for a previous Blanchie, before creeping weight gain took its toll.

Dellarobia began dismantling the octopus of warm, stuck-together clothing, pulling out socks, while Dovey tried to fold tiny flannel shirts whose seams puckered like lettuce.

The sun gained its legs in the forest throughout the morning, warming the air by imperceptible degrees until she realized her fingers had thawed and she no longer needed her outer layers.

Little humps of moss that swelled along a scar in the asphalt like drops of green blood.

Clouds lay low on the mountain, erasing its peaks, making the rugged landscape look like flatland.

The fog congealed into a low, think cloud cover, and she'd seen no butterfly action for over an hour.

The boys took it more to heart, predictably, although the instigator was a big rough girl in a decrepit parka whose fake fur hood was matted like old shag carpet.

Preston and Cordie bore the wide-eyed, zipped up expression children assume in the presence of unraveling adults.

They watched the sun paint pink light across the belly of every cloud in the eastern sky.