Walk Two Moons
Sharon Creech (1994)
“A thirteen-year-old girl rides cross-country with her grandparents, telling them a friend's strange story to avoid telling her own — until both stories converge at the same cliff edge in Idaho.”
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Walk Two Moons
Sharon Creech (1994) · 280pages · Contemporary
Summary
Thirteen-year-old Salamanca Tree Hiddle travels from Ohio to Idaho with her eccentric grandparents, Gram and Gramps, retracing the route her mother took when she left the family and never came back. To pass the time, Sal tells them the story of her friend Phoebe Winterbottom, whose mother also disappeared — a story about mysterious messages on the doorstep, a possible lunatic, and a family cracking apart. But Sal's telling of Phoebe's story is really a way of circling her own grief without touching it directly, and Creech layers the two narratives so that every revelation about Phoebe's family mirrors or illuminates a truth about Sal's. By the time Sal reaches Lewiston, Idaho, and the site of the bus crash that killed her mother, she has walked enough moons in enough moccasins to understand that every person she has judged — Phoebe's lunatic, her father's friend Mrs. Cadaver, her mother herself — had reasons she could not see.
Why It Matters
Won the 1995 Newbery Medal, one of the most prestigious awards in children's literature. Has sold millions of copies worldwide and been translated into numerous languages. Became one of the most widely assigned middle-school novels in American education, alongside Bridge to Terabithia and Tuck Ev...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Informal first-person narration with a poetic undercurrent — Sal's voice is a thirteen-year-old's vocabulary carrying a poet's observations
Narrator: First-person retrospective with embedded storytelling. Sal is both narrator and character, and Creech exploits the ga...
Figurative Language: Moderate
Historical Context
Early 1990s America: Walk Two Moons was published at a moment when children's literature was expanding its emotional range. The 1990s saw middle-grade novels begin to address grief, mental health, and family dysfunctio...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Sal tells Phoebe's story to Gram and Gramps instead of talking about her own mother. Why does she choose someone else's story — and what does the act of telling Phoebe's story actually accomplish for Sal?
- The novel's title comes from the proverb 'Don't judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccasins.' By the end of the novel, whose moccasins has Sal walked in? List at least three characters and explain what Sal learned from each.
- Phoebe is convinced that the 'lunatic' on her doorstep is dangerous. What drives her certainty — and what does the novel suggest about the relationship between fear and judgment?
- Mrs. Winterbottom and Sugar both leave their families. How are their reasons for leaving similar, and how are they different? What does the novel argue about what happens when mothers are seen only as mothers?
- Creech names Sal's mother 'Sugar' and gives her the last name 'Hiddle.' She names the neighbor 'Cadaver' and Sal's friend 'Winterbottom.' How do the names in this novel function — what do they reveal, conceal, or foreshadow?
Notable Quotes
“Don't judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccasins.”
“I prayed to every tree I passed.”
“You can't keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair.”
Why Read This
Because this book will teach you something no lecture can: how to understand someone whose choices make no sense to you. Sal spends the whole novel hating, fearing, and misjudging people — Mrs. Cadaver, the lunatic, even her own mother — and every...