From Elizabeth McCracken, The Souvenir Museum (a short story collection)

Since it's a Kindle book I can't give page numbers.

From "The Irish Wedding": "The tractor slowed them down, but so did Sadie's sense that in the dark Ireland was making itself up as it went along."

from "Proof": "David was not superstitious except in this way: he liked to feel lucky...he never crossed his fingers or made wishes, but every day was an omen for itself....The sun was shining in Scotland, clouds like storybook sheep above them though the local sheep were goatish, angular, weird. It was a good day, which meant it would be a good ay, which meant every day for a while might be good."

from "Mistress Mickle All At Sea": "The world was their oyster. An oyster was not enough to sustain anyone."

and

"Now she thought, Icarus, Newton's apple, David Bowie, impossible beautiful falling things."

from "A Walk-Through Human Heart": "She knew her maternal love would always be edged with meanness, so as to matter: sometimes you needed a blade to get results."

and

"A junk shop, a proper one, was like walking into someone else's disordered brain, which operated on this lie: it was good to collect ephemera because if things were worth saving--if a volume of Reader's Digest Condensed Books with abridgements of Ngaio Marsh could persist--why not all of us?" (God I love the rhythm of that sentence, the way the hyphen takes the reader into the trivial and arbitrary and then she surprise smacks you with the Big Universal) 

from "The Souvenir Museum"

"Souvenir: a memory you could buy. A memory you could plan to keep instead of being left with the rubble of what happened."

and

"Her actual heart found the door behind which her metaphorical heart hid; heart dragged heart from its bed and pummeled it."

And for a change, I thought I'd dissect a bad sentence.

From Mexican Gothic, on Kindle so I can't say a page # but it's in chapter 9.  Noemí is a young single woman in 1950s Mexico. She likes to flirt and her the author Sellers-García describes her disinclination towards marriage: "Marriage could hardly be like the passionate romances one read about in books. It seemed to her, in fact, a rotten deal..." The paragraph goes on and ends "Yet the thought of anyone more substantial made her nervous, for she was trapped between competing desires, a desire for a more meaningful connection and the desire to never change. She wished for eternal youth and endless merriment." This sentence had been underlined by 1067 readers, presumably not to point out how bad it is, but I think it gets to the problem of the novel.

The novel is told in the 3rd person, but the narrator is Noemí--everything is seen and judged through her eyes. This is evident in the opening of the paragraph--Marriage could hardly be like...(this is Noemí's conclusion). But the end of that paragraph is something that Silvia Sellers-García knows, but Noemí should not. To write a character you have to know everything about that character (or maybe not, but clearly Sellers-García does), including their motivations, conscious and unconscious, but the character can't know these things about his or herself, the reader needs to be allowed to discover them (unless there is an omniscient narrator who is separate from the character). It's psychologically inverisimilar, but more importantly, it's dull for the reader.