1995: WALK TWO MOONS by Sharon Creech
Gramps says that I am a country girl at heart, and that is true.
The greatest short story in American history is, of course, Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", which you probably read in high school, although it was originally published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1890. Kurt Vonnegut also believed it to be the greatest short story of all time. It was adapted into episodes of, among other television shows, The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Scrubs1, and the story's central narrative trick was enormously influential and was copied in countless other stories across media from Lynch's Mulholland Dr. to the Bon Jovi video for "Dyin' Aint Much of a Living". So, if you haven't read it, I'm about to spoil it, but you had 133 years to find out how it ends.
“Occurrence” is about a Confederate soldier being hanged at a bridge in Alabama by the Union soldiers who have captured him. As he drops off the bridge, the rope that was supposed to kill him breaks, and he is able to swim away from his would-be hangmen, evade their gunfire, and escape into the woods. He treks overnight back to his plantation, hallucinating all sorts of weird stuff along the way as you might expect from someone who has just had a traumatic near-death experience, and finally reaches home near the end of the story. As his wife rushes out to embrace him, the rope tightens around his neck and he dies. Because the rope never broke. Because he never really escaped. Because everything that happened, from the rope breaking onward, was all in the prisoner’s head, in the split-second before he died.
There are many Newbery medalists that are about death, many that introduce child readers to grief and loss and the senselessness of life being taken away from us, in widely varying circumstances. Apart from 1995 medalist Walk Two Moons, there are not very many Newbery medalists that are about denial.
I loved Sharon Creech growing up; reading her stuff felt like watching a movie, a good movie with memorable wisecracking characters and fun soundtrack cues and a strong sense of place and of theme, and a movie that wasn’t afraid to try and make you feel something even though you were a kid. She was my first introduction to books that we would consider directly “life-affirming”. You know what she’s writing about and how she wants you to feel, and she’s good at helping you visualize the setting in which she wants you to consider it. Walk Two Moons is not her only acclaimed novel for children2, but it is probably the darkest. I mean, it’s a very funny and very charming and, again, life-affirming novel. But it’s dark.
There are two stories in Walk Two Moons; the first is narrated by thirteen-year-old Salamanca “Sal” Hiddle, who recently moved from a ranch in Kentucky to a suburb in Ohio and is acclimating to her new school. She makes an eccentric friend, Phoebe, who tends to jump to hysterical conclusions about everything in her life, which begins to complicate things an awful lot when 1) a mysterious stranger keeps knocking on Phoebe’s door looking for her mother, and 2) her mother suddenly leaves her family, with only a note explaining that she can’t come back for a while. Phoebe assumes that her mother has been abducted, and enlists Sal in a madcap (and very funny) adventure to figure out who the stranger was, and where her mother has gotten to, and what her life is supposed to be now.
But all of that is framed by the second story of Walk Two Moons. Sal is narrating the story about Phoebe and the missing mother to her own grandparents, who are taking Sal on a road trip from Kentucky to Lewiston, Idaho. Because, as it turns out, Sal's mother has been missing this whole time as well. A few months ago, she packed up and left her family on a bus trip for Idaho, not really giving a reason besides a need to be alone for a little bit and think things through. Once her mother got to Idaho, Sal and her dad learned that her mother would not be returning. And Sal is desperate to see her again. So we end up with two stories narrated in parallel, a road trip to find a lost mother, and a wacky adventure to track down a different lost mother.
As we learn by the end of the book, Phoebe's mother had been contacted by her estranged son from a previous relationship and left her family for a few days to reunite with a son that none of her current family knew about. It's a tense chapter in the life of Phoebe’s family, but the novel ends with them beginning to get through it and reconcile; ultimately, this storyline is funny and very sweet. As to the other storyline: Sal's mother, who is described on page 5 of the novel as "resting peacefully in Lewiston, Idaho", is dead. She has been dead the whole time, although she frequently appears in flashbacks. Sal doesn't see her grave, and state outright that she is dead, until the final chapters of the novel. The bus that Sal's mother took to Idaho careened off of a cliff and most of the passengers died, placing Walk Two Moons in the top quintile of "baroque major character deaths" among Newbery medalists.
I have read Walk Two Moons maybe fifteen times in my life. When I read it for this essay, I was wrestling with two questions: when does Sal actually know that her mother is dead? And when is the reader supposed to know?
I first read Walk Two Moons within a year or two of its release; I would have been ten or eleven years old. On that first read, the reveal at the end of the book that Sal’s mother was dead was a shock to me. I also assumed - perhaps because I was not paying very close attention to the book - that it was a shock to Sal as well. My wife and I got into a debate over this recently as I re-read the book3; I wanted to entertain the possibility that Sal may not have even fully realized that her mother was dead until the end of the novel, but my wife maintained that it was pretty obvious Sal knew the whole time.
Going back through the book, even a not-particularly deep read makes it seem clear, in retrospect, that my wife was correct: Sal knew about her mother the whole time and has spent most of the novel refusing to process it, although she was aware of what was going on. Repeatedly throughout the book, Sal or Phoebe, in the two parallel storylines, says "I don't want to hear it", usually in response to their respective dads trying to talk through difficult situations with them. They also say "she can't be dead, she was just alive a minute ago" repeatedly, referring to animals, trees, the sibling that Sal's mother lost in a miscarriage. There are clearly recurring themes that point to a terrible tragedy that Sal is refusing to face head-on (for understandable reasons).
But is that really what's happening? Because Sal also states, pretty directly, that she's not entirely sure her mom is dead. So is this denial?
“When my mother did not return, I imagined all sorts of things. Maybe 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. My father said ‘She does not have cancer, Sal. She does not have amnesia…’. But I didn’t believe him. Maybe he was trying to protect her - or me.”
Or is this?
“And even though Mrs. Cadaver had told me all this and had told me how she had been with my mother in her last minutes, I still did not believe that my mother was actually dead. I still thought that there might have been a mistake. I don’t know what I had hoped to find in Lewiston. Maybe I expected that I would see her walking through a field and I would call to her.”
And hey, maybe it is. Maybe Sal’s not understanding what was happening, or clinging to some foolish hope way longer than she should, is entangled with some deeper understanding of what’s really going on. Maybe denial, and processing death in general, is messy and confusing and difficult for a child to articulate or understand, and maybe Creech has captured that uniquely well in this novel. But is that a plot twist?
If you’re an adult reader, this is not really a plot twist. It is very obvious, from page 5 when Sal describes her mother as “resting peacefully”, that Sal’s mother is dead. It is also obvious on page 10 when Sal’s father brings up some traumatic event in the past and says of Sal “she doesn’t want to know.” Which suggests that this is a book pitched at child readers, which is obviously something that we already knew and not exactly insightful. But I have to think that the very obvious cues from Creech on the death of Sal’s mother are deliberate. I honestly think she meant to give it all away that early.
The experience of reading Walk Two Moons as an adult becomes something very different from the experience of reading it as a child. As a child, you play the movie in your head and go on the wild adventure with Sal and Phoebe and hear the wind rushing past Sal’s window on her road trip and end up wrenched by the big reveal at the end, when Sal saw the grave and “it was only then, when I saw the headstone and her name…that I knew, by myself and for myself, that she was not coming back.” As an adult, you don’t play the movie in your head the same way, because distracting you from the story is the knowledge that Sal’s mother is dead and that she knows her mother is dead, that she keeps talking about denial and refusing to see things as they really are. That knowledge and the story sound constantly in your head like two loud tones a half-step apart. You are seeing it all happen but also knowing that there’s something more to the story under this all, something that Sharon Creech is refusing to put into the actual words of the story, but you know it is all there and it is clearly affecting the way people talk and act in this story and why won’t she just put the words in there, does she not even know what she’s doing. It’s maddening. It’s tense. It’s what denial feels like.
If you’re a fiction author, one not-subtle way to communicate your theme to young readers is to make one of your characters a literal junior high English teacher and have him explain how symbolism works, which is an actual scene in Walk Two Moons. One of Sal’s classmates starts to complain about having to find symbols in all of the books they read, and her teacher, Mr. Birkway, responds by finding the classic “Rubin’s Vase” optical illusion. You know, the one where some people see a vase or some people see two faces, this one:
Sure enough, some of Sal’s classmates see the vase, and some of her classmates see the two faces. And Mr. Birkway explains:
“[He] said that the drawing was a bit like symbols. Maybe the artist only intended to draw a vase, and maybe some people look at this picture and see only that vase. That is fine, but if some people look at it and see faces, what is wrong with that. It is faces to that person who is looking at it. And, what is even more magnificent, you might see both… ‘Isn’t it interesting,’ Mr. Birkway said, ‘to find both? Isn’t it interesting to discover that snowy woods could be death and beauty and even, I suppose, sex? Wow! Literature!'”
I think Creech wanted us to find both, which sets Walk Two Moons apart from most of the other medalists I’ve read. She wanted us to sink into Sal’s stories, but she also wanted that discomfort throughout, that knowledge that Sal had obviously given away her mother’s death early, but for some reason was refusing to bring it up directly in her narration, instead only glancing at it every now and then. She wanted us to read about her denial and feel it at the same time, and she wanted that denial reflected throughout her hall-of-mirrors of a novel, through Phoebe’s refusal to accept that her mom had left her, through Sal’s grandparents facing down their own mortality, through Sal’s dad finding love with another widow. It is heavy and emotionally dense, but remains one of the most emotionally dense and ambitious novels in the Newbery canon. Many of the Newbery authors have tackled death, the big subject that every author and every artist - and really, every person - has to tackle someday. But Creech found one of the most original and risky ways to do it, and pulled it off magnificently.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1943 medalist, Adam Of The Road by Elizabeth Gray Vining.
Otherwise known as "The Big Three" of television shows.
Her novel Ruby Holler won the Carnegie medal, which is like the British Newbery; notably, Creech is the first American to ever win this award.
In case you're wondering what it's like in our home, there are a lot of debates over the major themes of 28-year-old novels written for children.