Delightful. Here is another book with voice, but I think you could pick out any sentence and use it to teach conventions. For example, “‘Oh, Miss Perfidy,’ I whispered to her as I was jostled aside by doctors and nurses trying to jolt her back to life with machines. ‘You knew things too. You just wouldn’t believe that you knew them.'”
Now, I did not ruin the ending for you by quoting that. Miss Perfidy is a perfectly minor character in the book yet Polly Horvath handles her death with the right amount of grace and humour. The tone in the book is spot on and the characters are strongly unique. I have got to find more of her books.
Primrose, Waffle’s main character, perseveres through her parents being lost at sea, and while everyone in town believes them to be dead, she alone has hope that lost does not mean dead. I won’t give any quotes here–you’ll have to read the book to find out if Primrose’s hopes are realized.