Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech

I absolutely loved this book as a kid, and read it many times. So this was a Newbery I wanted to revisit anyway. I had a hard time getting into it at first, because I was reading a bunch of other books at the same time and it never drew me in with the limited time I was giving it. But once I finally sat down to read, I couldn't stop.

This book is the story of Salamanca Tree Hiddle, who is on a road trip with her grandparents to go find her mother, who left a few years ago and went to Lewiston, Idaho. While on the way, Salamanca tells her grandparents the story of her friend Phoebe Winterbottom, and on the way learns a lot about her own story and her own relationship with her mother. It was really interesting reading this book as an adult, as a mother this time. I had never really thought too much about Salamanca's mom before--I don't think I thought she was selfish, but I didn't understand her leaving. It seemed so strange for a mother to leave like that. But now, as a mother myself--I can only think about the pain she must have been in. She must have been waiting for years of infertility to have another baby, then to lose the baby and any chance of any more--she must have been seriously grieving and questioning her whole point in life. She wasn't leaving to run away and never come back--she just needed a reset, and she would have come back if she could. I was tearing up at the end, when Salamanca finds what she needed and when their trip comes to an end. I loved seeing how Salamanca grew and learned and healed through this trip with her grandparents, and what she learned about her mother by trying to walk in her shoes and see things as her mother did.

This part really stuck out to me, and I think I will be thinking about it for a while. It's something that I worry about often--like if something small I do could cause something terrible to happen, and how do you live through that?
"I wondered if Gram's snake bite had anything to do with her stroke, and if Gramps felt guilty for whizzing off the highway and stopping at that river. If we hadn't gone to that river, Gram would never have been bitten by that snake. And then I started thinking about my mother's stillborn baby and maybe if I hadn't climbed that tree and if my mother hadn't carried me, maybe the baby would have lived and my mother never would have gone away, and everything would be as it used to be.
But as I sat there thinking these things, it occurred to me that a person couldn't stay all locked up in the house like Phoebe and her mother had used to do at first. A person had to go out and do things and see things, and I wondered, for the first time, if this had something to do with Gram and Gramps taking me on this trip."