It was all so clever. Bach was a musical genius, but he didn’t stop with beautiful music. He had all these jokes and numerical riddles running in his notes—forward, backward, and upside down sometimes. Two of her favorite things in one package: math and music! Oh, how she loved Bach!
Giant Pumpkin Suite by Melanie Heuiser Hill
Music is music in any language, and Father doesn’t have to say much during the lessons. When one of his students plays well, he smiles. And when a student plays a sour note, Father just puts on a look of great suffering.
Yang the Youngest and His Terrible Ear by Lensey Namioka
I picture it. A black box with nothing inside it but me and the music. It sounds soothing, like a sleeping bag zipped all the way up.
Tune It Out by Jamie Sumner
What made it all the scarier was that the castle did not stay in the same place. Sometimes it was a tall black smudge on the moors to the northwest, sometimes it reared above the rocks to the east, and sometimes it came right downhill to sit in the heather only just beyond the last farm to the north. You could see it actually moving sometimes, with smoke pouring out from the turrets in dirty gray gusts.
Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
One of the first things she’d learned upon her arrival in this world was that the children of Talhaven didn’t have white hair. If she wanted to blend in, she needed to change hers. The color she’d chosen—black with just that hint of white—reminded her of a rook, a common crow. That was how she’d come up with her name, since she didn’t remember her real one.
The Door to the Lost by Jaleigh Johnson
The stranger, all dressed in black from her hat to her boots, slips from shadow to shadow as if she were no more a shadow herself, unnoticed.
The Case of the Missing Marquess by Nancy Springer
He shuddered, then drew his shoulders in and fiddled with his collar as if he suddenly felt cold. “No one knows what it is, or what its nature might be. But it has a local name.” He took a deep breath, then spoke in a voice of guttural dread. “We call it … the Creeping Shadow.”
The Creeping Shadow by Jonathan Stroud
It wasn’t that I did not believe in ghosts; it was that I believed in them in the same noncommittal way that I believed in giant squids or lucky coins or Belgium.
Jackaby by William Ritter
“I’m back here,” bellowed a voice that, unfortunately, belonged to my big brother, Topher, and not one of the dearly departed. I’d never actually seen a ghost in our kitchen; I’d only heard it banging around. But due to my home’s location, I figure I’m bound to run into a ghost eventually.
The Key to Extraordinary by Natalie Lloyd
They can use spit to test your DNA. They can put it through a machine and see every gene in your body, read you like a book. Which would be fine, except that my DNA holds the biggest secret of my life.
Tentacle & Wing by Sarah Porter
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