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.”
About Sharon Creech
Sharon Creech (born 1945 in South Euclid, Ohio) grew up in a large, storytelling family with roots in rural Kentucky. She studied literature and writing in college, then spent eighteen years living and teaching in England and Switzerland before returning to the United States. Walk Two Moons, her second novel, won the Newbery Medal in 1995. Creech has spoken extensively about the autobiographical roots of the book: her family's Kentucky farm, her own experience of displacement when her family moved, and her fascination with the gap between the stories families tell and the truths those stories conceal. The road trip across America in the novel was inspired by a trip Creech took with her own family, and Sal's voice was the first thing Creech found — the rest of the story grew from a thirteen-year-old girl who needed to get somewhere and was telling someone else's story to avoid telling her own.
Life → Text Connections
How Sharon Creech's real experiences shaped specific elements of Walk Two Moons.
Creech grew up in South Euclid, Ohio, but her family had deep roots in rural Kentucky
Sal's displacement from Bybanks, Kentucky, to Euclid, Ohio — the exact geographic trajectory of Creech's own family
The specificity of Sal's homesickness — the trees, the farm, the sensory world she lost — comes from Creech's own experience of a child's landscape being replaced by a suburban one. The grief is for a place, not just a person.
Creech lived abroad for eighteen years, teaching in England and Switzerland
The novel's deep engagement with displacement, the question of where 'home' is, and the idea that you must leave a place to understand what it meant to you
An expatriate writer understands homesickness not as nostalgia but as a cognitive restructuring — the place you left becomes more vivid in memory than it was in reality. Sal's Bybanks is this kind of heightened-by-absence landscape.
Creech grew up in a large family with strong oral storytelling traditions
Gram and Gramps's storytelling, Sal's embedded narration, the novel's argument that you understand your life by telling someone else's story first
The nested narrative structure is not a literary conceit but a naturalistic rendering of how storytelling families actually process experience — you tell your cousin's story to make sense of your own.
Creech has spoken about a specific family road trip across the American West that inspired the novel's journey
The cross-country drive with Gram and Gramps, the specific landmarks (Badlands, Mount Rushmore, the Idaho mountains), the car as confessional space
The road trip is not generic American picaresque but a specific, remembered experience of the landscape's power to change the people moving through it. The landmarks are not set dressing; they are emotionally calibrated.
Historical Era
Early 1990s America
How the Era Shapes the Book
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 dysfunction with the same seriousness previously reserved for young adult or adult fiction. Creech's innovation was not the subject matter (grief, loss, absent mothers) but the structural complexity: a nested narrative that requires a thirteen-year-old reader to hold two stories simultaneously and understand that one is a metaphor for the other. The novel's treatment of Sal's Seneca heritage is notable for its period — Creech integrates Sal's Native American identity as a natural part of who she is (her name, her connection to the land, the moccasin proverb) rather than making it the subject of a 'diversity' lesson. The 1990s road trip is used not for escape but for return — Sal is driving toward, not away from, the truth.