Booktalking Colorado - Full Booktalk Record

Booktalking Colorado Full Record:

	Title:	Walk Two Moons
	Author:	Creech, Sharon
	Date Published:	1994
	Genre:	Real Life
	Grade Level:	5 - 7
	Booktalker:	Susan Bartel

Booktalk:
My name is Salamanca Tree Hiddle. I have long silky black hair that I can sit on if I want to. I’m 13 years old and my life was lived in Bybanks, Kentucky, with my mother and father. My mother’s real name was Chauhassen which means “tree sweet juice” but every called her Sugar. And my father is the kindest, most honest and simple man I’d ever seen. He never got angry. He was a just a good man. And that was part of the problem. My mother, a good person herself, never felt she measured up to the Hiddles. She felt only her failings. She only knew what she wasn’t. And so one April day she left my father and me, headed for Lewiston, Idaho, because she said she had to. She said she’d be back before the tulips bloomed, but, of course, she wasn’t. Nothing was right after that. My father saw reminders of my mother everywhere. So we packed up and moved to Euclid, Ohio. My father had a job there that Margaret found for him. Margaret is a nurse with flaming red hair and a voice that sounds like dried leaves blowing. Her last name is Cadaver. How can you trust a nurse named Cadaver? But my father sure seemed to like her. In Ohio is where I met Phoebe, Phoebe Winterbottom. She lived across the street from Margaret. Phoebe was round, with very large blue eyes and a face surrounded by yellow curls. She saw disaster everywhere. People were either perfect, like her father, or potential axe murderers. The story that’s told in this book is about the trip my gramps and gram took with me to see my mother in Idaho. They wanted to go. I wanted to go too, but was afraid. Gramps and Gram were tottery old folks, full to the tops of their heads with goodness and sweetness and mixed in with all of that was a large dash of peculiarity. Gramps calls Gram his gooseberry and he calls me chickabitty. Gram’s favorite expression for something that excites her is “Huzza, huzza.” Partly I was going along to make sure they behaved. When we started out grams asked is I would entertain them. So I began by telling stories about Phoebe and her family. Phoebe is a good person to tell stories about because her life included possible murders, a lunatic, her mother being kidnapped or worse, trips to the police station and strange notes left on her family’s doorstep. The interesting thing is, as I tell Phoebe’s stories, I seem to understand more and more of my own story. And what a story it is: You’ll smile through your tears reading Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech.