The Case of the Missing Marquess by Nancy Springer

This is an Enola Holmes Mystery--Enola Holmes being the much younger sister of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes.  It is a delightful look at the late 1800s.

Opening:

The only light struggles from the few gas street lamps that remain unbroken, and from pots of fire suspended above the cobblestones, tended by old men selling boiled sea snails outside the public houses.

What Hearts by Bruce Brooks

As he ran down the winding tar path that led through the woods to the street, he took a quick inventory:  his knapsack, straining at its straps, held a blank blue composition book and three unsharpened yellow pencils (for a summer journal; everyone had gotten these), a battered hardback copy of a book called The Little Prince (no one else had received this; the librarian had slipped it in secret to "my best little reader"), a mimeographed copy of the school handbook complete with all kinds of forms to be brought in on the first day of second grade in September (everyone, of course), six certificates stamped with foil medallions (one for completing the dumb first-grade reader with its "See Spot jump!" stories, one for being able to print the alphabet in upper and lower case, one for being able to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "You're a Grand Old Flag," all of which everyone got, even Gordon Firestone, who never got the words right to the latter song and still couldn't tell the difference between  small "d" and "b," "g" and "q"; the other three were from gym class, for being able to run and jump and roll (some boys had gotten more than the three, but they were show-offs); a big, glossy bland-and-white photograph of the whole class (for everyone, even the two kids who had missed school on the day the picture was taken; Asa had been sick with a bad cold himself, but his parents had made him come for the picture, in which he was the only one wearing a jacket and tie); and, finally, a report card.

War Games by Audrey & Akila Couloumbis

Above them, the weight of the grapevines rested on thick beams, the leaves trembling with the activity of so many small birds they could not be counted.

Petros understood the war to be something large and rolling toward them like an avalanche.

The Pox Party: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson

I was raised in a gaunt house with a garden; my earliest recollections are of floating lights in the apple trees.

On some summer nights, when it was hot and the atmosphere itself seemed cut with anger--the buzzing of the cicadas in the trees of the avenue harsh with it, broiling--on those nights, we could hear mobs go by in the streets, issuing out from the docks.

The Killer's Tears by Anne-Laure Bondoux

No one ever arrived here by chance.  Here was nearly the end of the world, close to the southernmost tip of Chile, which resembles lace in the cold Pacific waters. ~ opening

Her eyes met those of Angel Allegria--small eyes, deeply set, as if pushed into their sockets by blows; eyes that betrayed a brutal wickedness.

Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy

More rock had fallen from the rock above, piling between the stems of the thorn-trees like froth among the reeds of a backwater.

Into this great, still lake the jutting ribs of the cave walls ran like buttresses to meet the angle of their own reflections, then on down into the darkness.

The small light of the flame pushed the darkness back, a palpable darkness, deeper even than those dark nights where the black is thick as a wild beast's pelt, and presses in on you like a stifling blanket.

As far as I could see, we were in a small cove sheltered by the wind by a mighty headland close to our left, but the seas, tearing past the end of the headland and curving round to break among the offshore rocks, were huge, and came lashing down on the shingle in torrents of white with a noise like armies clashing together in anger.

The waves must have been rushing up forty feet, and the master waves, the great sevenths, came roaring up like towers and drenched us with salt fully sizty feet above the beach.

The sea soughed and beat below the window, the wind plucked at the wall, and ferns growing there in the crevices rustled and tapped.

The land after the rain smelled rich and soft, ploughing weather, nutting weather, the squirrel-time for winter's coming.

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.