What a great article. Our Missing Hearts sounds like a wonderful book. The funny thing is I can relate because I had to leave a highly paid job for family reasons, and ended up getting a job as a shelver in a University Library.
The debate about the necessity of quotation marks to define dialogue is a very interesting one, and will probably never be settled. I am for it, but as long as you can tell that someone is speaking, and who, it isn’t really a problem.