More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
sproingily
daguerreotypes,
paurotis
caimans, gharials, Burmese and African pythons,
lachrymose morning glories, and a rare Cuban croco...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
ursine alopecia.
melaleuca
jai alai
I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn’s rings.
“cetaceous
imbricating
Gulch
periphyton, a brownish-orange algae that reproduced explosively in the Florida heat and could draw its pumpkin lace across the entire Pit overnight. Everything else was pretty still.
otoliths,
gastroliths.
Mangroves
marl
cocoplums
Obsidian
“ ‘The language of the living rains down on the dead,’ ” Ossie read to me from The Spiritist’s Telegraph, “ ‘and often our communications can overwhelm them. The hailstorm of our words can be too intense for them to bear …’ ”
beautiful oblivion.
FATIDIC
OPPROBRIUM
Fine Lime
slough.
aria.
anole
hydrocephalic
anhinga
Island tameness is the tendency of many populations and species of animals living on isolated islands to lose their wariness of potential predators. “We Bigtrees are an island species,” he told us. “I’ve been reading your brother’s textbook here.” He hoisted an antiquarian-looking book with the faded coin of a Library Boat sticker on its spine. “Turns out we islanders are very special. A bunch of new and wonderful crap can evolve here because we’re off to ourselves. But there are also trade-offs. Island species get complacent.” NEW PREDATOR: WORLD OF DARKNESS he wrote, and beneath this: OUR
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
When you are waiting for somebody for that long, your ceiling fan can whip ordinary air into a torture.
caimans
rotary.
runic
cairns
Palominos.
herpetological
caruncle
pipping!
anoles,
septuagenarians.
squamosal
vise
and then got up to pour another gloomy-looking glass of pond-apple juice. If you’ve ever tried this pee-colored stuff, you know of its vileness. Eve and Adam would have spit this stuff out and waited millennia until they could get a soda from the café. Pond apples taste like turpentine—we fed them to the Seths—and the Chief and old Sawtooth were the only humans I knew who could hold that stuff down. Kiwi said it was because the men in our family were “competitive masochists” [n]. He held that we kids were absolved from ever having to drink the poison inside a pond apple by Florida law and
...more
VALEDICTORY
“Your brother stole from us,” the Chief said, his head busy in the refrigerator. He emerged with a mesh sack of oranges and kept talking to us in the same cheerful drawl. “Three hundred dollars missing from my wallet. Kid took the change, too. Took the goddamn nickels. Really. Go on, girls, have a look.”
jaunt
That was how he always put it to us when he left on business, “a jaunt.” When Mom was well these trips could last a month or more.
He was going to buy us adaptations: wings and goggled eyes, skin suits, new tridents for hooking Seths. The crocs in the Carolinas could be shipped to us by Christmas. Soon the indigenous Bigtrees would be able to compete with our niche competitor, that exotic invasive species of business, the World of Darkness. I mentioned that he might run into Kiwi on the streets of downtown Loomis, and he looked up at me through a fog. “What’s that now, Ava?” he bellowed across the carpet. Steam came dreaming up from the little ark of the iron. “Who?”
warren,
