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.

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.