Walk Two Moons

by Creech, Sharon

• ISBN13: 9780060233341
• ISBN10: 0060233346
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-05-01
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

"Don't judge a man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins."

As Salamanca Hiddle travels cross-country with her eccentric grandparents, she tells them the story of Phoebe Winterbottom, who met a "potential lunatic" and whose mother disappeared. Beneath Phoebe's story is Salamanca's own: Her mother left for Idaho, and although she promised to return, she has not. Sal hopes to bring her mother home, despite her father's warning that she is "fishing in the air."

This novel is in turns funny, mysterious and touching, as Salamanca comes to a new understanding of aspects of her life.

"The book is packed with humor and affection and is an odyssey of unexpected twists and surprising conclusions." - 1995 Newbery Award Selection Committee.

Table of Contents

A Face at the Window	1	(3)
The Chickabiddy Starts a Story	4	(6)
Bravery	10	(7)
That's What I'm Telling You	17	(8)
A Damsel in Distress	25	(4)
Blackberries	29	(7)
Ill-Ah-No-Way	36	(5)
The Lunatic	41	(5)
The Message	46	(7)
Huzza, Huzza	53	(6)
Flinching	59	(11)
The Marriage Bed	70	(10)
Bouncing Birkway	80	(4)
The Rhododendron	84	(7)
A Snake Has a Snack	91	(7)
The Singing Tree	98	(4)
In the Course of a Lifetime	102	(5)
The Good Man	107	(7)
Fish in the Air	114	(7)
The Blackberry Kiss	121	(8)
Souls	129	(2)
Evidence	131	(11)
The Badlands	142	(10)
Birds of Sadness	152	(5)
Cholesterol	157	(7)
Sacrifices	164	(6)
Pandora's Box	170	(7)
The Black Hills	177	(4)
The Tide Rises	181	(8)
Breaking In	189	(9)
The Photograph	198	(7)
Chicken and Blackberry Kisses	205	(12)
The Visitor	217	(5)
Old Faithful	222	(4)
The Plan	226	(7)
The Visit	233	(3)
A Kiss	236	(3)
Spit	239	(4)
Homecoming	243	(8)
The Gifts	251	(5)
The Overlook	256	(8)
The Bus and the Willow	264	(5)
Our Gooseberry	269	(5)
Bybanks	274

Excerpts

Walk Two Moons

Chapter One

A Face at the Window

Gramps says that I am a country girl at heart, and that is true. I have lived most of my thirteen years in Bybanks, Kentucky, which is not much more than a caboodle of houses roosting in a green spot alongside the Ohio River. just over a year ago, my father plucked me up like a weed and took me and all our belongings (no, that is not true--he did not bring the chestnut tree, the willow, the maple, the hayloft, or the swimming hole, which all belonged to me) and we drove three hundred miles straight north and stopped in front of a house in Euclid, Ohio.

"No trees?" I said. "This is where we're going to live?"

"No," my father said. "This is Margaret's house."

The front door of the house opened and a lady with wild red hair stood there. I looked up and down the street. The houses were all jammed together like a row of birdhouses. In front of each house was a tiny square of grass, and in front of that was a thin gray sidewalk running alongside a gray road.

"Where's the barn?" I asked. "The river? The swimming hole?"

"Oh, Sal," my father said. "Come on. There's Margaret." He waved to the lady at the door.

"We have to go back. I forgot something."

The lady with the wild red hair opened the door and came out onto the porch.

"In the back of my closet," I said, under the floorboards. I put something there, and I've got to have it."

"Don't be a goose. Come and see Margaret."

I did not want to see Margaret. I stood there, looking around, and that's when I saw the face pressed up against an upstairs window next door. It was a round girl's face, and it looked afraid. I didn't know it then, but that face belonged to Phoebe Winterbottom, a girl who had a powerful imagination, who would become my friend, and who would have many peculiar things happen to her.

Not long ago, when I was locked in a car with my grandparents for six days, I told them the story of Phoebe, and when I finished telling them--or maybe even as I was telling them--I realized that the story of Phoebe was like the plaster wall in our old house in Bybanks, Kentucky.

My father started chipping away at a plaster wall in the living room of our house in Bybanks shortly after my mother left us one April morning. Our house was an old farmhouse that my parents had been restoring, room by room. Each night as he waited to hear from my mother, he chipped away at that wall.

On the night that we got the bad news--that she was not returning--he pounded and pounded, on that wall with a chisel and a hammer. At two o'clock in the morning, he came up to my room. I was not asleep. He led me downstairs and showed me what he had found. Hidden behind the wall was a brick fireplace.

The reason that Phoebe's story reminds me of that plaster wall and the hidden fireplace is that beneath Phoebe's story was another one. Mine.

Walk Two Moons. Copyright © by Sharon Creech. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.