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.

Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork

The parking lot is empty except for Rabbi Heschel's car, a red Volkswagen Beetle she calls Habbie, after the prophet Habakkuk, because, she says, the car, like the prophet, has been crying for years without anyone paying attention.

I am not supposed to, but I open the top drawer of his desk. There are pen refills, paper clips that have been extended and can no longer serve their function, lots of pennies, business cards, a menu for a Thai restaurant, a small ball made from rubber bands, a drawing of a spiderweb on a sticky, a magnifying lens, three plastic spoons, a napkin, dental floss, a cough drop that is stuck to the bottom, a dozen Pepto-Bismol tablets.

As we get closer, we see an assortment of plastic animals on the front lawn: a family of deer, two white swans (now grayish), a mother duck with six ducklings behind her (one tipped over), two rabbits kissing each other, a brown fox, a groundhog up on its hind legs, a flamingo that could have been pink at one time but is now a whitish color.

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

The truth about my son is that despite his good nature, his intelligence, his extensive education, and his bulldozer energy, he is as blunt as a kick in the shins.

The valley, changing from hour to hour, battle-fronts of clouds forming along the bases of the mountains, charging, breaking, scattering in tatters and streamers wildly flying; tops of the mountains seen with ineffable colors on them at sunset and the nearer hills like changeable cut velvet.

The first of them [letters worth reading] comes eleven months, one novel, one miscarriage, some anxious cases of measles and whooping cough, and some miles of her hasty illegible scrawl after the one I have just quoted.

From the narrows the river poured white and broken into the mineral green of the pool, which smoothed it within fifty feet. At the bottom of the pool the water visibly bulged, walling against the rockslide, and twisted right to find a way through. (p. 403)

It was his capacity for feeling that she should have attended to: by failing to comprehend it, she probably contributed to his silence.

Gladness and guilt hit her like waves meeting at an angle on the beach.

The Trumpeter by Eric P. Kelly

I just discovered this 1928 Newberry Award winning book. What a jewel! Well-written and full of information about 15th century Krakow. I loved the following paragraph:

Not until then did he seek comfort and counself from his wife, who had always been his solace at such times; throwing himself down beside her on the wagon seat, he told her the story of his late discoveries, the absence of the king, the death of his kinsman. For a second the woman's heart quailed before the fresh difficulties, but she forgot self at the look in her husband's face. Her quiet reply, "We will wait, for God is in the waiting."