{"id":706,"date":"2006-03-17T22:38:12","date_gmt":"2006-03-18T03:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/?p=706"},"modified":"2006-03-21T01:07:11","modified_gmt":"2006-03-21T06:07:11","slug":"walk-two-moons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2006\/03\/17\/walk-two-moons\/","title":{"rendered":"Walk Two Moons"},"content":{"rendered":"

1995 Newbery Medal Winner: Walk Two Moons, by Sharon Creech<\/p>\n\nThe Plot<\/b>
\nSalamanca Hiddle and her father moved to Ohio after her mother left them, but Sal still has hopes that her mother will come back to join them. She and her grandparents set off on a road trip to visit her mother, and on the way, Sal entertains them with the story of her year in Ohio and the strange incidents which occurred in the life of her friend Phoebe.<\/p>\n

My Thoughts<\/b>
\nI admit, I was fooled by the title of this one. I thought for sure it was going to be a story about Indians or Indian culture in some way; that theory fit in pretty well with what seems to be a main criterion for Newbery selection: the book needs to teach a life lesson, be multicultural, or have literary pretensions. Or, even better, several of the above. Once in a while one with none of the above will manage to slip through, but it’s very rare.<\/p>\n

Here, as I said, I was fooled by the title. While Sal and her mother have Indian blood in them, they don’t live on a reservation and, in fact, one of the plot threads of the book takes place in middle class suburbia. But in spite of that, this wasn’t one of those books that managed to slip through, either.<\/p>\n

The story of Phoebe which Sal tells to her grandparents has obvious parallels to her own: Sal’s mother has left her family, and to the reader, it’s obvious from the beginning that Phoebe’s mother is fixing to have a nervous breakdown or bolt herself. At the start, Mrs. Winterbottom reads almost like a case study from the Feminine Mystique, though in the end we find that her own particular story was a little more complicated than just the problem without a name.<\/p>\n

Sal’s own story was fairly well telegraphed from the start of the book, though the author did an admirable job of trying to avoid saying it until the end. Her own mother, depressed and grieving after having a stillborn baby, took off on a cross country bus trip to try and find herself again. She probably would have returned to her family on her own, but unfortunately, there was an accident with the bus and she was killed. Sal’s father took care of all of the arrangements himself, so the reality of the situation hasn’t exactly settled on Sal yet, even after so much time has passed. She can’t quite believe that her mom is really gone.<\/p>\n

This book and Missing May had quite a lot in common, as they both featured a girl and her father-figure attempting to cope with the death of the mother-figure. And if you just pull out the Sal road-trip portions of this story, you’d end up with a novella not at all unlike Missing May. But in this story we have a second half: Sal’s school life in Ohio and her involvement with Phoebe’s family. This provides the author with a chance to round out Sal a bit and make her a bit more real than Summer got to be. Her intense denial about the loss of her mother isn’t the only thing we ever see about her.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the author also felt the need to kill off another character toward the end of the book. She used this to try and illustrate a point — Sal’s father had not brought the body of her mother home to be buried, but had left her near where the bus accident occurred. In the one sense, this is part of what allowed Sal to continue to be in denial, but by the end of the story, she’s decided that she doesn’t need to have a grave she can visit to feel that her mother’s spirit is nearby. The other death is handled in the opposite fashion, and a nearby gravesite is established which can be visited frequently.<\/p>\n

I’m just not convinced that we need this extra example to highlight the lesson Sal learned. The death felt gratuitous to me in every sense of the word, since the main character didn’t even seem to care that much. She was upset, but she’d already been very upset.\n<\/pracut>\n

In Short<\/b>
\nI have to take the full 1.5 points off here for the sudden death, since I don’t feel it was really all that necessary. What did Sal gain by having to deal with that, too? For the rest of it, it was an interesting, if predictable, book. It was obvious that the lunatic was not a lunatic; it was obvious that Mrs. Cadaver was not evil; it was obvious that Phoebe’s mother was not kidnapped. But the reader was never encouraged to believe these things, it was just something which one or more of the characters thought, and that was okay for them. I’d give this a 7\/10, knocked down to 5.5\/10.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1995 Newbery Medal Winner: Walk Two Moons, by Sharon Creech The Plot Salamanca Hiddle and her father moved to Ohio after her mother left them, but Sal still has hopes that her mother will come back to join them. She and her grandparents set off on a road trip to visit her mother, and on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,25],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}