I’ve been sitting here for days, trying to put into words how much I love Ava’s Man by Rick Bragg and why exactly I love it.  What it comes down to is that I love this book so much that it’s hard to put it into words without sounding creepily romantic or melodramatic.  I’m also on vacation, which means that visiting with my sister, hugging her adorable kids, and going to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios is a mite bit more important to me than writing book reviews right now.  So, instead of posting some foolish, meandering blather, I’ll just post a few of my favorite quotes from the book.  Maybe then you’ll understand part of why I feel this book is such a pearl.  You may not think these are quite as hilarious as I think they are, but it’s hard to deny Rick Bragg’s wonderful way with words.

“A weak man would have just laid out that day, and if he had been home Ava would have killed him dead as Julius Caesar.”

“Dying would get him out of some yard work, but summer after summer has come and gone and Claude’s yard is still just as neat as a widow’s closet.”

After a story about a man shooting a horse instead of the “revenuer” riding it -  “He would not have been missed that much, revenuers being about as popular as itch.”

“In fact, as the year crept by, as he looked less and less like a pink monkey and more like a human, as babies naturally do, he looked more and more like his daddy.”

“‘Who the hell is that,’ she shouted to the darkness outside, and if there had been a woman standing there, right there, she would have knocked her cold as a tater and bounced up and down on her head.”

“His nose was long and hooked . . . and it curved all the way down past his lips.  I would not have believed it if the people telling me his story had not raised their right hand to God.”

Those are just the quotes I remembered to mark with a sticky note.  Ava’s Man is chock full of these.  Seriously, go read it.  It’s amazing.