“When she reaches down to touch his shoulder—a gesture only a few species and a million or so years removed from lifting a leg and marking him as her territory with a stream of urine—enough bracelets and bangles to lay track across the Australian Outback slide down her arm and come to a jangling stop at her wrist.”

“Australians are descended from a boatload of English convicts, right? So two hundred years in isolation at the bottom of the planet is plenty of time for the language to evolve into some sort of double-speak prison slang.”

“Suddenly, the giant, three-headed dog that guards the entrance to the Underworld appears next to her—sans two of its heads—and sits down. As a child, we had a neighbor with a Great Dane, and I know they’re about three feet tall at the shoulder. Allow another twelve inches for their T-Rex-sized heads, and you’ve got a dog that this woman could throw a saddle on and ride like a pony.”

“You can donate marrow for her, Alice Faye, you can’t cure her. You can win a poker tournament, but that won’t make her want to live. So I’ll ask you again: Who are you, and what are you doing here? Because Munny sure doesn’t want you to be her, and she wants someone to be out in the world living since she’s got the market cornered on dying right now.”

“I don’t think Australians ever use a couple of words when twenty will do just fine.”

“I have a totally unhealthy and unrealistic fear of being eaten by a great white shark. This is because I belong to a very specific demographic called American Child Whose Parents Made the Ill-Advised Decision To Allow Her To Watch the Movie Jaws At a Sleepover During Her Formative Years.”

“Like your sweet, affectionate house cat, Alice Dahl is easy to underestimate. It’s not until the songbirds in the yard show up eviscerated on the front porch that you realize you should’ve kept that bell collar on her—because those poor birds never even saw her coming.”