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.