Book: Olive's Ocean by Kevin Henkes
Finished: March, 2009
Pages: 217
Challenges:
** Spring Reading Thing
** New Authors
** Read and Review
** Support Your Local Library
** 20 in 2009
** Unshelved Challenge

First Sentence: "Are you Martha Boyle?"

Last Sentence: ...and she did so, loudly: "I'm home"

I loved Martha Boyle! What a realistic portrayal of a 12 year old girl on the cusp of adulthood. Henke's prose is sparse but effective and the structure of the book really worked for me--the short little chapters, some only 1 paragraph long yet speaking volumes to the reader. Even though I am in my late '40s, I still remember those confusing pre-teen years and all the emotion that accompanied them--the difference being that I was not forced to think about death because a classmate my age had passed away.

I originally chose this book for the Unshelved Reading Challenge and you can see the comic strip synopsis of it here.

One of my favorite passages:

" The world can change in a minute, and at the same time remain unchanged. Martha's incident in the ocean had lasted no longer than that--a minute. Martha, gulping air, her chest heaving, realized that, in one way, during that time, the world hadn't changed a a bit--Lucy was still as happy as could be, exactly where she had been left, and Jimmy Manning and the girl had passed by oblivious. But, in another way, the world had changed dramatically--because Martha understood for the first time that the world didn't revolve around her, that it was bigger than that, that it simply was, and would continue to exist with or without her. But she was here, and wanting to be, more than ever."