Sharon Creech
(South Euclid)
“…the Ohio Turnpike…is the flattest, straightest piece of road in God’s whole creation,” says Salamanca “Sal” Tree Hiddle, the narrator of Sharon Creech’s Newbery Award-winning novel Walk Two Moons (1994).
Sal is a Kentucky native living in Euclid with her father. Her grandparents pick her up to take her on a cross country to Lewiston, Idaho, where her mother is “resting peacefully.” In the car, Sal tells her grandparents the story of her friend Phoebe, a girl with a big imagination who is struggling to come to terms with her mother’s disappearance. Sal’s and Phoebe’s stories intertwine to form a meditation on girlhood, motherhood, and death. “If people expect you to be brave,” Sal says, “sometimes you pretend that you are, even when you are frightened down to your very bones.”
Creech’s other notable books include Bloomability (1998), The Wanderer (2000), Love that Dog (2001), Ruby Holler (2002), and Hate that Cat (2008).
If you enjoyed Walk Two Moons, we suggest these Ohio side trips:
- Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming
- Shelley Pearsall’s All Shook Up
- Michelle Hout’s The Beef Princess of Practical County