THE NEXT AFTERNOON, once the snow has stopped and even begun to melt away into mud, a body washes up against the small strip of land near the lighthouse. The ID in her pocket says that this is Marian Wallace, and it does not take long for Lambiase to deduce that the body and the baby are, in fact, related. - P56
She was pretty and smart, which makes her death a tragedy. She was poor and black, which means people say they saw it coming. - P57
He is not fat, though he is built like a bulldog—thick-muscled neck, short legs, broad, flat nose. A sturdy American bulldog, not an English one. - P58
"What’s strange to me," A.J. says, "is why she was on Alice Island in the first place. It’s kind of a pain to get here, you know. My own mother’s visited me once in all the years I’ve lived here. You really believe she wasn’t coming to see someone specific?" - P59
He is a reader, and what he believes in is narrative construction. If a gun appears in act one, that gun had better go off by act three. - P59
He thinks back to the last Footnotes show, which had been a tribute to eighties music. For his bathtub performance, he follows the program pretty closely, beginning with "99 Luftballons" then segueing into "Get out of My Dreams, Get into My Car." For the finale, "Love in an Elevator." He only feels mildly foolish. - P63
If Jenny were a book, she would be a paperback just out of the box—no dog ears, no waterlogging, no creases in her spine. - P64
At first, he had mainly bought mass-market paperbacks—Jeffery Deaver and James Patterson (or whoever writes for James Patterson)—and then A.J. graduates him to trade paperbacks by Jo Nesbø and Elmore Leonard. Both authors are hits with Lambiase, so A.J. promotes him again to Walter Mosley and then Cormac McCarthy. A.J.’s most recent recommendation is Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories. - P72
The process had taken the average amount of time, concluding the September before Maya’s third birthday. The major strikes against A.J. had included his lack of a driver’s license (he had never gotten one on account of his seizures) and, of course, the fact that he is a single man who had never raised a child or even a dog or a houseplant. Ultimately, A.J.’s education, his strong ties to the community (i.e., the bookstore), and the fact that the mother had wanted Maya to be placed with him had outweighed the strikes. - P73
The most annoying thing about it is that once a person gives a shit about one thing, he finds he has to start giving a shit about everything. - P76
And then, despite the fact that A.J. does not believe in God, he closes his eyes and thanks whomever, the higher power, with all his porcupine heart. - P76
The store is seven Mayas wide and twelve Mayas long. She knows this because she once spent an afternoon measuring it by lying her body across the room. It is fortunate that it is not more than twenty Mayas long because that is as far as she could count on the day the measurements were taken. - P81
Books typically smell like Daddy’s soap, grass, the sea, the kitchen table, and cheese. - P82
What is "the same kind of black"? She looks at her hands and wonders. Here are some other things she wonders about. How do you learn to read? Why do grown-ups like books without pictures? Will Daddy ever die? What is for lunch? - P83
Maya knows that her mother left her in Island Books. But maybe that’s what happens to all children at a certain age. Some children are left in shoe stores. And some children are left in toy stores. And some children are left in sandwich shops. And your whole life is determined by what store you get left in. She does not want to live in the sandwich shop. - P84
"Sometimes books don’t find us until the right time." - P92
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