Walk Two Moons Literary Elements

Young-adult fiction

Euclid, Ohio, Kentucky, Lower Midwest and Great Plains, U.S.A.; 1990s

Salamanca Tree Hiddle, a thirteen-year-old girl from Bybanks, Kentucky, narrates from the first-person perspective.

The tone moves between lightness, reverence, sorrow, and a genuine curiosity about the world that is often seen in bildungsroman literature. The mood, similarly, moves between humorous and mournful. It manages both silliness and somberness.

Sal is the protagonist. There are a few false antagonists, like Margaret Cadaver and the "lunatic" Mike Bickle, but there are no truly antagonistic characters.

Sal cannot accept that her mother isn't ever returning. A secondary, parallel conflict in the framed narrative is that Norma Winterbottom has disappeared.

The climax occurs when Sal drives alone from Coeur d'Alene to Lewiston, Idaho, pulls off the road, and descends to the abandoned and destroyed bus on which her mother took a tour of the Great Plains. At this point, the reader realizes that Sal's mother was killed in a bus accident and has been dead for over a year.

The novel is full of clues and foreshadowing that portend the revelation of the climax. As early as the second chapter of the book, Sal openly discusses how she is "terrified of cars and buses" (7) and uses language like "resting peacefully" (5) when describing her mother's current status in Idaho. Other instances of foreshadowing include how Sal's father John talks about the total impossibility of Chanhassen's return, and Margaret's extremely unusual last name—Cadaver—that suggests the presence of death.

When Gram is bitten by a water moccasin, she says, "I do believe [the snake] has had a snack out of my leg" (95), which is a humorous and vastly understated way of telling everyone that she's been bitten by a snake whose venom is extremely deadly. The event ultimately leads to Gram's death.

Many literary allusions appear in the novel through Mr. Birkway's class. He teaches Sal and her classmates Greek myths, including the story of Prometheus and Pandora's box. He also teaches them a Longfellow poem, "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls."

Creech uses a lot of landscape imagery and, through Sal, writes about trees and birds with an animistic, spiritual tone.

Sal is concerned by how much they're stopping on the way to Lewiston. She believes that all of the sightseeing is keeping her from her mother when, in fact, it is bringing her closer to her mother because it allows her to see the things her mother saw on her way to Idaho.

Phoebe's and Sal's narratives are clear parallels; this is explicitly stated at several points in the novel. Sal's mother leaves because she feels that she needs to figure out who she is independent of her family. Norma, Phoebe's mother, leaves for a similar reason. She feels hemmed in by her family's expectations of her to be "Mrs. Supreme Housewife" (30).

Sal has learned from her mother to feel a very real communion with nature. Throughout their road trip, Sal will describe hearing the wind and the trees whisper to her urgent directions, either to rush or to slow down.