A love of words

Can I share something with you? Below are two excerpts from In the Woods by Tana French, a book that was gifted to me this Christmas by a cousin who is serious about her book-o-philia (I'm sure there's a latin term for that, but I'm too lazy to look it up). Take a minute and tell me what you think:

Picture a summer stolen whole from some coming-of-age film set in small-town 1950s. This is none of Ireland's subtle seasons mixed for a connoisseur's palate, watercolor nuances within a pinch-sized range of cloud and soft rain; this is summer full-throated and extravagant in a hot pure silkscreen blue. This summer explodes on your tongue tasting of chewed blades of long grass, your own clean sweat, Marie biscuits with butter squirting through the holes and shaken bottles of red lemonade picnicked in tree houses. It tingles your skin with BMX wind in your face, ladybug feet up your arm; it packs every breath full of mown grass and billowing wash lines; it chimes and fountains with birdcalls, bees, leaves and football-bounces and skipping-chants, One! two! three! This summer will never end. It starts every day with a shower of Mr. Whippy notes and your best friend's knock at the door, finishes it with long slow twilight and mothers silhouetted in doorways calling you to come in, through the bats shrilling among the black lace trees. This is Everysummer decked in all its best glory.

...The wood is all flicker and murmur and illusion. Its silence is a pointillist conspiracy of a million tiny noises-rustles, flurries, nameless truncated shrieks; its emptiness teems with secret life, scurrying just beyond the corner of your eye. Careful: bees zip in and out of cracks in the leaning oak; stop to turn any stone and strange larvae will wriggle irritably, while an earnest thread of ants twines up your ankle.

Are you hooked yet? I love how descriptive and vibrant her writing is - covering all the senses. The sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and feel of summer. And how she uses descriptive words in new ways - summer "exploding," the "fountain" of bird calls, the "irritable" larvae and an "earnest" trail of ants. But what I love most about Tana French's books (she wrote a sequel - The Likeness), are the relationships. The easy camaraderie between characters.

So if you're in need of something to read on a warm sunny day at the park, this might be just what you're looking for.