Walk Two Moons + When You Reach Me
I have been warned repeatedly about Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons, and for once forewarned was definitely forearmed, because I didn’t chuck the book across the room when the ending turned out to be both a cheat and deatherrific.
The story is told in the first person, and we find out at the end that Salamanca has been keeping an important piece of information from us since the beginning: her mother is dead, and has been dead since before the book began. I despise books that create a “twist” by having the main character not tell us something incredibly important. It’s cheating; it’s cheap and lazy plotting.
I also felt uncomfortable by the book’s subtheme about Indians and Indian culture. To be fair, Salamanca’s mother Sugar seems like exactly the kind of person who would try to bolster her wavering little individuality by believing she has a special connection with nature because she’s one-eighth descended from that-tribe-that-begins-with-S - she thought the tribe was named Salamanca (hence her daughter’s name), but it turned out to be Seneca, oops.
It ties into something that I actually liked about the book, which is that Sugar seems like a real and very flawed person: Salamanca misses her because Sugar is her mother, despite all her flaws.
But I don’t think we’re meant to see “appropriates Indian culture” as one of Sugar’s flaws, so...it makes me uncomfortable.
***
I’ve also been reading - actually, listening to the audiobook of - Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me, a time-travel mystery set in the 1970s. Inevitably the heroine Miranda is a huge fan of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time; this sets up a comparison between the two books which is rather hard on When You Reach Me.
Basically, A Wrinkle in Time expects the reader to be smart enough to keep up, while When You Reach Me expects the reader to be dumb as a rock and need the basics of time travel explained to them three times, at length, in a manner that more or less spells out the mechanics underlying the plot. I guess most of the major twists before they happened.
However, despite its predictability, When You Reach Me did have some good points. It does an excellent job showing Miranda’s character growth, which I think is hard to do well: people often either drag it out too long or rely too heavily on sudden epiphanies that cause the character to turn their behavior instantly and without apparently relapsing.
But I thought Stead did a good job balancing the slow and painful with the sudden epiphanies (and making the post-epiphany growth seem reasonable) - particularly impressive, given that Miranda starts out as quite a brat. (I actually started a review when I was halfway through the book, complaining that Miranda was by far the least sympathetic or interesting character in it).
There’s a scene I particularly like where Miranda realizes that her jealousy has led her to misjudge and mistreat another girl, feels so appalled at herself that she wants to sink into the floor - and instead, sets out to make amends and make herself the kind of person she won’t need to feel bad about.
The story is told in the first person, and we find out at the end that Salamanca has been keeping an important piece of information from us since the beginning: her mother is dead, and has been dead since before the book began. I despise books that create a “twist” by having the main character not tell us something incredibly important. It’s cheating; it’s cheap and lazy plotting.
I also felt uncomfortable by the book’s subtheme about Indians and Indian culture. To be fair, Salamanca’s mother Sugar seems like exactly the kind of person who would try to bolster her wavering little individuality by believing she has a special connection with nature because she’s one-eighth descended from that-tribe-that-begins-with-S - she thought the tribe was named Salamanca (hence her daughter’s name), but it turned out to be Seneca, oops.
It ties into something that I actually liked about the book, which is that Sugar seems like a real and very flawed person: Salamanca misses her because Sugar is her mother, despite all her flaws.
But I don’t think we’re meant to see “appropriates Indian culture” as one of Sugar’s flaws, so...it makes me uncomfortable.
***
I’ve also been reading - actually, listening to the audiobook of - Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me, a time-travel mystery set in the 1970s. Inevitably the heroine Miranda is a huge fan of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time; this sets up a comparison between the two books which is rather hard on When You Reach Me.
Basically, A Wrinkle in Time expects the reader to be smart enough to keep up, while When You Reach Me expects the reader to be dumb as a rock and need the basics of time travel explained to them three times, at length, in a manner that more or less spells out the mechanics underlying the plot. I guess most of the major twists before they happened.
However, despite its predictability, When You Reach Me did have some good points. It does an excellent job showing Miranda’s character growth, which I think is hard to do well: people often either drag it out too long or rely too heavily on sudden epiphanies that cause the character to turn their behavior instantly and without apparently relapsing.
But I thought Stead did a good job balancing the slow and painful with the sudden epiphanies (and making the post-epiphany growth seem reasonable) - particularly impressive, given that Miranda starts out as quite a brat. (I actually started a review when I was halfway through the book, complaining that Miranda was by far the least sympathetic or interesting character in it).
There’s a scene I particularly like where Miranda realizes that her jealousy has led her to misjudge and mistreat another girl, feels so appalled at herself that she wants to sink into the floor - and instead, sets out to make amends and make herself the kind of person she won’t need to feel bad about.