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.