Saturday, January 06, 2007
Book Review - Walk Two Moons - YA Fiction
It isn’t easy losing your mother when you’re young. Death can take her, illness can ravage her and hospitalizes her, or she can grow unable to take the pressures of society and family and exit to parts unknown. Salamanca (Sal), Ben and Phoebe share the common loss of their mothers, under the respective listed circumstances. By sharing their situations Sal learns to accept the truth about her mother in Sharon Creech’s humorous and emotional novel, Walk Two Moons.
Phoebe is Sal’s best friend who is certain there is a lunatic around every corner, and a conspiracy lurking on the edges of shadows. But it is through the story of Phoebe and her idiosyncrasies that Sal shares with her grandparents on a cross-country trip. Through this sojourn Salamanca learns about herself and the frustrations she underwent when her mother deserted her and her father.
Bybanks, Kentucky, on the Ohio River, was home before mom decided she could no longer tolerate herself and hopped a bus to Lewiston, Idaho. Mom left behind memories of her that frustrate dad and Sal, to the degree that Sal’s father packed her and himself off to Euclid, Ohio where there was nothing that even resembled a farm. “My mother did haunt our house in Bybanks, in the fields and the barn. She was everywhere. You couldn’t look at a single thing without being reminded of her.”
The loss of a parent, for whatever reason, is seldom accepted by the children. Even when the truth is known, it is not embraced as gospel. Children seek an alternative answer in order to satisfy their hearts. “”That’s it,” Phoebe said. “I’m going to search for clues, for evidence that the lunatic has been here and dragged my mother off. I wanted to tell her that she was fishing in the air and that probably her mother had not been kidnapped, but I knew Phoebe did not want to hear it.
“When my mother did not return, I imagined she had cancer and didn’t want to tell us and was hiding in Idaho. Maybe she got knocked on the head and had amnesia and was wandering around Lewiston, not knowing who she really was, or thinking she was someone else.” To think the truth, she left on her own volition, only leads to guilt, i.e.: she left because of me.
Phoebe’s paranoia that assists in humor development as well as giving Sal the mirror of Phoebe’s soul to reflect upon and realize her own reality. “Underneath all the odd behavior was someone who was frightened. And in a strange way, she was like another version of me – she acted out the way I sometimes felt.” Sal wanted to call her friend Phoebe and tell her “maybe her mother had gone looking for something, maybe her mother was unhappy, maybe there was nothing Phoebe could do about it. For the first time it occurred to me that maybe my mother’s leaving had nothing whatsoever to do with me. It was separate and apart. We couldn’t own our mothers.”
Observing Ben’s visit with his mother at the psychiatric hospital brought memories to Sal. “”This is my mother,” Ben said. I said hello but she didn’t look at me. Instead she stood, and drifted across the lawn as if we were not there. Ben and I followed. She reminded me so much of my mother after she returned from the hospital. My mother would stop right in the middle of doing something inside the house and walk out the door.”
Salamanca’s mother’s disappearance broke Salamanca’s dreams and her bullish spirit. “I used to love to drive that old green pickup truck. I dreamed about turning sixteen and getting a license, but when Momma left, something happened to me. I became afraid of things I had never been afraid of before, and driving was one of these things. I didn’t even like to ride in cars, let alone drive the truck.”
Salamanca has a different outlook on her father. She prefers to see him sad, because when he’s sad she knows he’s remembering mom. Yet when she sees Phoebe’s father cry, a man who was stiff and in control prior to his wife’s fleeing, it upsets her more than seeing her own father cry for she expects her father to cry.
Creech’s book is jammed packed with social issues. Perhaps she implements the secret messages from a blind woman, Mrs. Partridge to explain social justices,for who doesn't know that justice is blind?:
1. In the course of a lifetime what does it matter?
2.Everyone has his own agenda. [“Everybody is just walking along concerned with his own problems, his own life, his own worries. And we’re all expecting other people to tune into our own agenda. ‘Look at my worry. Worry about me. Step into my life. Care about my problems. Care about me.’”]
3. Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked two moons in his moccasins.
4. You can’t keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head but you can keep them from nesting in your hair.
5. You don't know the worth of water until the well is dry.
“It seems to me that we can’t explain all the truly awful things in the world like war and murder and brain tumors, and we can’t fix these things, so we look at the frightening things even closer to us and we magnify them until they burst open. Inside is something we can manage, something that isn’t as awful as it had first seemed. It is a relief to discover that although there might be axe murders and kidnappers in the world, most people seem a lot like us: sometimes afraid and sometimes brave, some times cruel and sometimes kind.”
Could Salamanca be right?
Phoebe is Sal’s best friend who is certain there is a lunatic around every corner, and a conspiracy lurking on the edges of shadows. But it is through the story of Phoebe and her idiosyncrasies that Sal shares with her grandparents on a cross-country trip. Through this sojourn Salamanca learns about herself and the frustrations she underwent when her mother deserted her and her father.
Bybanks, Kentucky, on the Ohio River, was home before mom decided she could no longer tolerate herself and hopped a bus to Lewiston, Idaho. Mom left behind memories of her that frustrate dad and Sal, to the degree that Sal’s father packed her and himself off to Euclid, Ohio where there was nothing that even resembled a farm. “My mother did haunt our house in Bybanks, in the fields and the barn. She was everywhere. You couldn’t look at a single thing without being reminded of her.”
The loss of a parent, for whatever reason, is seldom accepted by the children. Even when the truth is known, it is not embraced as gospel. Children seek an alternative answer in order to satisfy their hearts. “”That’s it,” Phoebe said. “I’m going to search for clues, for evidence that the lunatic has been here and dragged my mother off. I wanted to tell her that she was fishing in the air and that probably her mother had not been kidnapped, but I knew Phoebe did not want to hear it.
“When my mother did not return, I imagined she had cancer and didn’t want to tell us and was hiding in Idaho. Maybe she got knocked on the head and had amnesia and was wandering around Lewiston, not knowing who she really was, or thinking she was someone else.” To think the truth, she left on her own volition, only leads to guilt, i.e.: she left because of me.
Phoebe’s paranoia that assists in humor development as well as giving Sal the mirror of Phoebe’s soul to reflect upon and realize her own reality. “Underneath all the odd behavior was someone who was frightened. And in a strange way, she was like another version of me – she acted out the way I sometimes felt.” Sal wanted to call her friend Phoebe and tell her “maybe her mother had gone looking for something, maybe her mother was unhappy, maybe there was nothing Phoebe could do about it. For the first time it occurred to me that maybe my mother’s leaving had nothing whatsoever to do with me. It was separate and apart. We couldn’t own our mothers.”
Observing Ben’s visit with his mother at the psychiatric hospital brought memories to Sal. “”This is my mother,” Ben said. I said hello but she didn’t look at me. Instead she stood, and drifted across the lawn as if we were not there. Ben and I followed. She reminded me so much of my mother after she returned from the hospital. My mother would stop right in the middle of doing something inside the house and walk out the door.”
Salamanca’s mother’s disappearance broke Salamanca’s dreams and her bullish spirit. “I used to love to drive that old green pickup truck. I dreamed about turning sixteen and getting a license, but when Momma left, something happened to me. I became afraid of things I had never been afraid of before, and driving was one of these things. I didn’t even like to ride in cars, let alone drive the truck.”
Salamanca has a different outlook on her father. She prefers to see him sad, because when he’s sad she knows he’s remembering mom. Yet when she sees Phoebe’s father cry, a man who was stiff and in control prior to his wife’s fleeing, it upsets her more than seeing her own father cry for she expects her father to cry.
Creech’s book is jammed packed with social issues. Perhaps she implements the secret messages from a blind woman, Mrs. Partridge to explain social justices,for who doesn't know that justice is blind?:
1. In the course of a lifetime what does it matter?
2.Everyone has his own agenda. [“Everybody is just walking along concerned with his own problems, his own life, his own worries. And we’re all expecting other people to tune into our own agenda. ‘Look at my worry. Worry about me. Step into my life. Care about my problems. Care about me.’”]
3. Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked two moons in his moccasins.
4. You can’t keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head but you can keep them from nesting in your hair.
5. You don't know the worth of water until the well is dry.
“It seems to me that we can’t explain all the truly awful things in the world like war and murder and brain tumors, and we can’t fix these things, so we look at the frightening things even closer to us and we magnify them until they burst open. Inside is something we can manage, something that isn’t as awful as it had first seemed. It is a relief to discover that although there might be axe murders and kidnappers in the world, most people seem a lot like us: sometimes afraid and sometimes brave, some times cruel and sometimes kind.”
Could Salamanca be right?
# posted by Bite Me Kissimmee @ 2:00 PM 
