Walk Two Moons
The Walk Two Moons series, Book 1
Sharon Creech
HarperTeen
Fiction, MG General Fiction
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Ever since her beloved mother left in the wake of a personal tragedy, nothing has gone right in Salamanca's young life. Her father withdrew into his grief, then uprooted them from their Kentucky farm all the way to a suburb of Ohio... not far from a woman Sal doesn't want to ever know or be friends with. This new house doesn't even have a barn, or chickens, or a climbing tree, and there's no swimming hole in sight. But there are, at least, a few kids her age, and despite her own lingering resentment she makes new friends - one of whom might need a friend herself, more than she'll ever admit. When Sal's grandparents take her on a road trip to Idaho, in honor of her mother's coming birthday, the thirteen-year-old girl tells them the story of that girl, Phoebe Winterbottom, whose runaway imagination and seemingly perfect family both fail her at the worst possible time.
REVIEW: This classic is about grief, connections, enduring through crises, and learning to look outside oneself and understand that everyone has their own story, their own tragedy, their own life that we know nothing about... even those we love the most. In telling Phoebe's story of a perfect mother who disappears - just after a stranger turns up on their doorstep (which Phoebe's wild imagination immediately dubs the "lunatic" who must have abducted her missing mother, because there's no other reason the woman would leave the daughters and husband she loves so much, is there?) - Salamanca (better known as "Sal") finally processes her own grief and anger and sense of abandonment and misplaced guilt over her own mom's disappearance. The story cuts between the road trip with her grandparents (who insist on detouring past various scenic attractions, even as Sal feels an urgent need to reach her mother by the woman's birthday), the story of Phoebe, and the tragedy that led to Sal's mother walking out and never coming home. Tragedy and sadness enter into all the stories, each of which emphasize the importance of learning to step outside yourself and not pass judgment on another until you "walk two moons in their moccasins" (there are underlying threads involving Sal's part-Indian ancestry). Life is a complicated business, as is grief, and we all must learn our own ways to deal with both without paralyzing ourselves through fears or guilt or other ultimately unhelpful coping mechanisms. Sal even learns to see beauty in her loss and her complicated feelings about moving forward without a mother in her life.
While many parts of the story hold up well and are timeless, there are a few places where Walk Two Moons shows its age. Sal starts feeling the first sparks of romance toward another friend's cousin, Ben, but the relationship feels less sweet and more like Ben seriously oversteps his bounds on numerous occasions and pushes himself at a girl who gives no indication of interest (until she inevitably does; women in this story tend to be ultimately defined by their loves and families and not on their own terms). I was seriously wondering if Creech was setting up a potential assault, given how Ben keeps pursuing her and forcing physical contact and telling her she's wrong to flinch away from his touch. Don't all girls owe it to guys to smile at them and let them touch and fondle and kiss them? (The first time they meet, not five minutes later he grabs her and fumbles a kiss - I was seeing red flags all over his character, but I guess that's what passed for "love" when this was written...) There was also another bit involving an English teacher who oversteps bounds on student privacy, reading aloud to the class excerpts from private journals he'd asked them to keep... and does not even pick up immediate cues from his class about the embarrassment and chaos he's sowing (even changing names, the kids of course know just who wrote what), but blithely plows on until finally running into something that affects him on a personal level. And there's one plot element that felt just a little too coincidental.
The overall story stands up, even with those drawbacks.
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