I recently reread this YA classic and enjoyed the voice as much now as I did when I was a Young Adult! This was published in 1968, so I must have read it when it just came out.
This was just the kind of talk to make me squirm, and he knew it, so I just sat there for a while and squirmed, and he puffed on the Havana and grinned. He took it out of his mouth, and looked at the tip, and then shot a left at me that caught me on the shoulder and stung down to my kneecaps. -- p.22
At the top, a thousand feet or so higher, the hot, dry desert air vanished, to be replaced by air with a completely different set of qualities; mountain air, cool, fresh and joyous to breathe, as clean in its own way as a breeze from the Gulf. -- p. 29
That's the best way to get through a war: Don't be big and strong, be hard to find. -- p. 34
To my left, burning out of the sea of pink and tan faces, was the meanest-looking human pan I'd ever seen, a brown flat face with hot black eyes, a mouth so thin and lipless and straight that it seemed like the slot in a piggy bank. -- p. 49
"It's pretty up here, isn't it?" I said, making some of the brilliant drawing-room repartee for which I was famous on three continents. -- p. 89
"Steenie, " Marcia said, "you lie better and more often than anybody I know. I don't think you'll ever make it to medical school. You're going to be a career grocery-bagger at Safeway, and get a testimonial dinner after forty years of putting the lettuce and the eggs at the botton of the sack with the cans on top." --p. 114
A rattly blue bus makes a daily circle of the little mountain towns in Cabezón County, from Sagrado to the valley at Yunque, and then up through the hills -- San Esteban, Santa María, Villa Galicia, Ojo Amargo, Río Venado, Río Conejo, Amorcita, and, at the end of the route, nearly 11,000 feet high, La Cima. -- p. 137
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