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For reasons that are unclear to Sal Hiddle, her mother left the family farm in Kentucky for Lewiston, Idaho, and did not return. Sal’s grief-stricken father rents out the farm that Sal loves and uproots her to Euclid, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. Sal hates her new home and cannot accept her father’s disturbing relationship with red-haired Margaret Cadaver, a nurse who has persuaded Mr. Hiddle to move to Ohio for work. Sal refuses to believe that her mother will never return.
 
That summer, Gram and Gramps Hiddle, Sal’s paternal grandparents, take her on a six-day car trip from Euclid to Lewiston, Idaho. Sal’s goal is to reach their destination on Sal’s mother’s birthday. The trio travels westward, retracing the route taken by Sal’s mother. To pass the time, Sal recalls the events that preceded her mother’s departure and at Gram’s insistence, narrates a tale of her experiences in Euclid that past year. At the heart of the story is Sal’s friend Phoebe Winterbottom’s grief over her mother’s sudden disappearance. The imaginative Phoebe insists that her mother has been kidnapped by a lunatic. Phoebe’s loss parallels Sal’s loss, and Phoebe’s story brings Sal’s into sharper focus. The mystery is solved when Phoebe’s mother returns home with the “lunatic”—a son whom she gave up for adoption years before and whom her family has not been told about.
 
Sal’s story does not have a similar happy ending. Gram is dying of a stroke, and Sal has driven herself to Lewiston to visit the scene of her mother’s death. The reader finally understands that Sal’s mother, who had suffered from an identity crisis, had set out for Idaho to find herself. When the bus in which she was riding careened off the road in Lewiston, all of the passengers died except for Margaret Cadaver, the last person to have seen Sal’s mother alive. The journey ends, Gram’s body is sent back to Kentucky for burial, and Gramps, Sal, and her father return to their beloved farm in Kentucky.
 
Sudden death and the grieving process are not subjects that lend themselves to humor. In Walk Two Moons, however, Sharon Creech addresses a child’s profound sense of loss in a novel that is often richly funny. In a voice that is homespun and true, Salamanca (“Sal”) Hiddle, Creech’s thirteen-year-old narrator, captures the peculiar behavior of family and friends as she travels west, following the journey her mother took before losing her life in a bus accident. Only at the journey’s end is Sal fully able to accept the finality of her mother’s death. And only at the novel’s end does the reader grasp the significance of the relationships between the characters and the incidents that occur along the way. Published in 1994, this poignant, comic novel—the author’s second book for young adults—won the 1995 Newbery Medal.
 
 
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