The Wanderer: A Newbery Honor Award Winner
304
The Wanderer: A Newbery Honor Award Winner
304Paperback(Reprint)
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Overview
Newbery Honor Book * ALA Notable Children's Book
“A beautifully written and imaginatively constructed novel that speaks to the power of survival and the delicacy of grief.” —School Library Journal (starred review)
This acclaimed bestselling Newbery Honor Book from multi-award-winning author Sharon Creech is a classic and moving story of adventure, self-discovery, and one girl's independence.
Thirteen-year-old Sophie hears the sea calling, promising adventure and a chance for discovery as she sets sail for England with her three uncles and two cousins. Sophie’s cousin Cody isn’t so sure he has the strength to prove himself to the crew and to his father.
Through Sophie’s and Cody’s travel logs, we hear stories of the past and the daily challenges of surviving at sea as The Wanderer sails toward its destination—and its passengers search for their places in the world.
“Sophie is a quietly luminous heroine, and readers will rejoice in her voyage.” —BCCB (starred review)
"Like Creech's Walk Two Moons and Chasing Redbird, this intimate novel poetically connects journey with self-discovery.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780064410328 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 11/21/2011 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Sales rank: | 185,513 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.20(w) x 10.88(h) x 0.69(d) |
| Lexile: | 830L (what's this?) |
| Age Range: | 8 - 12 Years |
About the Author
Sharon Creech has written twenty-one books for young people and is published in over twenty languages. Her books have received awards in both the U.S. and abroad, including the Newbery Medal for Walk Two Moons, the Newbery Honor for The Wanderer, and Great Britain’s Carnegie Medal for Ruby Holler.
Before beginning her writing career, Sharon Creech taught English for fifteen years in England and Switzerland. She and her husband now live in Maine, “lured there by our grandchildren,” Creech says.
www.sharoncreech.com
David Diaz has illustrated numerous award-winning books for children, including smoky night by Eve Bunting, for which he was awarded the Caldecott Medal; The Wanderer by Sharon Creech, which received a Newbery Honor; and Me, Frida by Amy Novesky, a Pura Belpré Honor Award winner. Mr. Diaz lives in Southern California.
Hometown:
Pennington, New JerseyDate of Birth:
July 29, 1945Place of Birth:
Cleveland, OhioEducation:
B.A., Hiram College, 1967; M.A., George Mason University, 1978Read an Excerpt
The Wanderer
Chapter One
The Sea
The sea, the sea, the sea. It rolled and rolled and called to me. Come in, it said, come in.
And in I went, floating, rolling, splashing, swimming, and the sea called, Come out, come out, and further I went but always it swept me back to shore.
And still the sea called, Come out, come out, and in boats I went'in rowboats and dinghies and motorboats, and after I learned to sail, I flew over the water, with only the sounds of the wind and the water and the birds, all of them calling, Sail on, sail on.
And what I wanted to do was go on and on, across the sea, alone with the water and the wind and the birds, but some said I was too young and the sea was a dangerous temptress, and at night I dreamed a terrible dream. A wall of water, towering, black, crept up behind me and hovered over me and then down, down it came, but always I awoke before the water covered me, and always I felt as if I were floating when I woke up.
Chapter Two
Three Sides
I am not always such a dreamy girl, listening to the sea calling me. My father calls me Three-sided Sophie: one side is dreamy and romantic; one is logical and down-to-earth; and the third side is hardheaded and impulsive. He says I am either in dreamland or earthland or mule-land, and if I ever get the three together, I'll be all set, though I wonder where I will be then. If I'm not in dreamland or earthland or mule-land, where will I be?
My father says my logical side is most like him, and the dreamy side most like my mother, which isn't entirely fair, I don't think. Myfather likes to think of himself as a logical man, but he is the one who pores over pictures of exotic lands and says things like "We should go on a safari!" and "We should zip through the air in a hot-air balloon!"
And although my mother is a weaver and spins silky cloths and wears flowing dresses, she is the one who gives me sailing textbooks and makes me study water safety and weather prediction and says things like "Yes, Sophie, I taught you to sail, but that doesn't mean I like the idea of you being out there alone on the water. I want you to stay home. Here. With me. Safe."
My father says he doesn't know who my hardheaded mule side resembles. He says mules don't run in the family.
I am thirteen, and I am going to sail across the ocean. Although I would like to go alone -- alone! alone! flying over the water! -- I'm not. My mule-self begged a place aboard a forty-five-foot sailboat with a motley crew: three uncles and two cousins. The uncles -- Stew, Mo, and Dock -- are my mother's brothers, and she told them, "If the slightest harm comes to my Sophie, I'll string you all up by your toes."
She isn't worried (although maybe she should be) about the influence of my cousin Brian -- quiet, studious, serious Brian -- but she frets over the bad habits I might learn from my other cousin, Cody. Cody is loud, impulsive, and charming in a way my mother does not trust. "He's too charming," she says, "in a dangerous sort of way."
My mother isn't the only person who is not thrilled for me to take this trip. My uncles Stew and Mo tried their best to talk me out of it. "It's going to be a bunch of us guys, doing guy things, and it wouldn't be a very pleasant place for a girl," and "Wouldn't you rather stay home, Sophie, where you could have a shower every day?" and "It's a lot of hard work," and yakkety-yak they went. But I was determined to go, and my mule-self kicked in, spouting a slew of sailing and weather terms, battering them over the head with all the things I'd learned in my sailing books, and with some things I'd made up, for good measure.
Uncle Dock -- the good uncle, I call him, because he's the one who doesn't see any harm in my coming -- said, "Heck, she knows more about boats than Brian and Cody put together," and so they caved in.
There are two other reasons my mother has not tied me to my bed and refused to let me go. The first is that Uncle Dock gave her an extensive list of the safety provisions aboard the boat, which include a satellite navigator, the Global Positioning System. The second reason, not a very logical one, but one that somehow comforts my mother, is that Bompie is on the other side of the ocean. We will end up in Bompie's arms, and she wishes she could join us just for that moment.
Bompie is my grandfather -- my mother's father, and also Uncle Dock, Stew, and Mo's father -- and he lived with my parents for many years. He is like a third parent and I love him because he is so like me. He is a man of three sides, like me, and he knows what I am thinking without my having to say it. He is a sweet man with a honey tongue and he is a teller of tales.
At the age of seventy-two, Bompie decided to go home. I thought he was already in his home, but what he meant by home was the place where he was born, and that place was "the rolling green hills of England."
My father was wrong about mules not running in the family. When Bompie decided to return to England, nothing was going to stop him. He made up his mind and that was that, and off he went.
Bye-bye, Bompie.
The Wanderer. Copyright © by Sharon Creech. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.Table of Contents
| I. | Preparations | |
| 1. | The Sea | 15 |
| 2. | Three Sides | 17 |
| 3. | Slow Time | 21 |
| 4. | The Big Baby | 25 |
| II. | Shakedown | |
| 5. | Afloat | 35 |
| 6. | Slugs and Bananas | 40 |
| 7. | Wildlife | 42 |
| 8. | The Dolt and the Orphan | 46 |
| 9. | Beheading | 50 |
| 10. | Ahoy | 56 |
| 11. | Juggling | 58 |
| 12. | Blah-blah-blah | 63 |
| 13. | Shakedown | 64 |
| 14. | Bompie and the Car | 70 |
| III. | The Island | |
| 15. | Grand Manan | 75 |
| 16. | Stranded | 80 |
| 17. | Tradition | 82 |
| 18. | Bompie and the Train | 89 |
| 19. | Wood Island | 95 |
| 20. | The Little Kid | 103 |
| 21. | The Baptism | 107 |
| 22. | Bompie and the Pastor | 112 |
| IV. | Under Way | |
| 23. | Whoosh! | 119 |
| 24. | Oranges and Pizza | 125 |
| 25. | Fired | 127 |
| 26. | Code | 130 |
| 27. | Insurance | 132 |
| 28. | Charlie-Oscar-Delta-Yankee | 136 |
| 29. | Blips | 139 |
| 30. | Knots | 148 |
| 31. | Rosalie | 150 |
| 32. | Bompie and the Swimming Hole | 157 |
| 33. | Life | 162 |
| 34. | Little Kid Nightmares | 167 |
| 35. | The Blue Bopper | 170 |
| V. | Wind and Waves | |
| 36. | Bouncing | 181 |
| 37. | Wind | 182 |
| 38. | Howling | 184 |
| 39. | Bobbing | 185 |
| 40. | No Time | 188 |
| 41. | Surfing | 189 |
| 42. | Battling | 193 |
| 43. | Weary | 194 |
| 44. | The Son | 195 |
| 45. | Alone | 196 |
| 46. | Bompie at the Ocean | 197 |
| 47. | Force Ten | 200 |
| 48. | Night | 202 |
| 49. | Spinning | 204 |
| 50. | The Wave | 208 |
| 51. | Limping | 213 |
| 52. | Jumbled | 214 |
| 53. | Bompie and His Father | 217 |
| 54. | Mr. Fix-it | 219 |
| 55. | Wet | 221 |
| 56. | Useful | 223 |
| 57. | Thinking | 226 |
| 58. | Little Kid: Push and Pull | 227 |
| 59. | New Dreams | 230 |
| 60. | Questions | 235 |
| VI. | Land | |
| 61. | Ahoy Ahoy | 241 |
| 62. | Land | 244 |
| 63. | Bursting | 246 |
| 64. | New Body | 249 |
| 65. | Push-Pull | 251 |
| 66. | The Visitor | 253 |
| 67. | Phone Calls | 255 |
| 68. | Wales | 258 |
| 69. | The Little Girl | 260 |
| 70. | The Castle | 266 |
| 71. | The Cottage | 267 |
| 72. | Bompie | 269 |
| 73. | The Story | 272 |
| 74. | Apples | 278 |
| 75. | Oh, Rosalie! | 282 |
| 76. | Gifts | 286 |
| 77. | Remembering | 290 |
| 78. | Home | 294 |
Interviews
Barnes & Noble.com Interviews Sharon Creech
With Walk Two Moons, Newbery Award-winning author Sharon Creech captured the hearts and imaginations of readers everywhere. Now she takes us on a memorable new journey with The Wanderer. In this novel, 13-year-old Sophie is the only girl among the six-person crew of The Wanderer, sailing across the Atlantic. She's eager to face the challenges of the sea, but her goofball cousin, Cody, doesn't seem to be serious about anything. Through Sophie's and Cody's engaging travel logs, the perilous journey of these six wanderers unfolds. But for Sophie, the true journey is into her past -- as she unlocks the pain she has been hiding from herself and discovers what it means to belong to a family. Jamie Levine of Barnes & Noble.com spoke to Sharon Creech and found out more about The Wanderer, her work, and her family life.
Barnes & Noble.com: Did you want to be a writer when you were growing up?
Sharon Creech: A writer was one of the things I wanted to be. I think like a lot of kids, I changed my mind about every six months. I wanted to be a singer, and an ice skater...and the closest thing to being a writer I wanted was to be a reporter. Because I thought that's what writing was. My brothers and I would interview people in my neighborhood for our own made-up newspapers, but often I didn't like their answers, so I would change them. I realized later, maybe when I was in middle school or high school, that there was this thing called fiction where you could change the facts of the story. I think that's when I really became interested in fiction -- really in college, when I studied good stories.
B&N.com: The dedication in The Wanderer is "For my daughter, Karin, who journeyed across the ocean and who inspired this story. From the mother who worried while you were gone." Tell me about that.
SC: My daughter is an amazing person. She does all the things that I am not brave enough to do. When she graduated from college, she and six of her friends -- all male -- sailed across the ocean, from Connecticut to Ireland, as a sort of celebratory "we-finished-college" trip. I was terrified when she set off on this trip -- it meant three weeks without being able to call her and check on her -- but she kept reassuring me, "Mom -- don't worry, everything's going to be fine." And she was going to keep a journal of the trip, and she said she'd share it with me when she got back. So about 12 days into their journey, I got a phone call that had been relayed from a ham-radio operator saying that they were fine, they were about halfway across, and there were no problems. So I relaxed a bit. And then another two weeks went by, and I finally got a call from Karin in Ireland, and she was just breathless and she said, "Mom -- we almost died!" Oh -- I was just shattered! So when I finally did hook up with her again, and she gave me her journal, it was just fascinating to read this story of living on a boat and then encountering a terrible storm that ripped the booms and the sails and knocked out their communications equipment. There were several days there when they didn't think they were going to make it. So ever since I read her journal, I've been wanting to sort of fictionalize that trip -- take characters on that same geographical journey and have them encounter a storm. That's really what The Wanderer came out of.
B&N.com: So you have no familiarity with sailing, yourself?
SC: Well, I do have a little bit. I have sailed, and I did take a course in sailing right before I started writing this book. I can sail on a lake or a river, but I would never, ever attempt the ocean!
B&N.com: Many of your characters -- including Sophie in The Wanderer -- spend a lot of time with their extended families. What was your family life like when you were growing up?
SC: It was very much like that -- extended families. I spent a lot of time with grandparents and aunts and uncles, and my father was from a really big family. Most of them lived in southern Ohio and Kentucky, and when they would come up to visit, it wasn't just two people coming, it was maybe eight people. And they would stay for several weeks. There were always people like that around me. I think that when I start developing a character, I naturally begin thinking, "What's the family like?" Actually, when I wrote Walk Two Moons, I was trying to create an opposite of my family -- just a single child in a family, whereas there are five kids in mine. But then almost immediately, I had to snare in the grandparents, because I couldn't identify with just one child, two parents, no extended family. So I think that just naturally comes up in every book I write.
B&N.com: So many of your stories are about teenage girls on journeys of discovery, dealing with difficult issues like loss and abandonment. Is there any particular reason why you keep returning to this theme?
SC: I thought about this after writing Walk Two Moons, because I was very puzzled when people started asking me this. I wrote Walk Two Moons right after my daughter went away to college. We were living in Europe, and she returned to the States. I'd encouraged her to do this, because she hadn't lived around Americans since she was seven years old, and yet I was practically in mourning when she left; I could hardly bear it. What I did in the story is that I turned it, flipped it, so that it wasn't the mother writing about the daughter who goes away; it was the daughter writing about the mother who goes away. And I wasn't doing that consciously. I think I was just exploring the idea of "How do you deal with the fact that someone you love is gone?" And that's just the form that it took.
When I try to put myself in the mind of a 13-year-old, it seems to me that one of the things I keep coming back to, what they're all sorting out that's universal, is "Who am I?" You don't question that when you're very young -- you're just part of a family, part of a unit. But there comes that point at age 10, 11, 12, 13, where you start trying to be like your friends, trying on all these different identities, and trying to figure out, "What am I going to be? What am I going to be like?" I think that's so interesting. It's such fertile ground for stories.
B&N.com: The Wanderer is told through the travel logs of two cousins -- a boy and a girl. Was it difficult writing in a boy's voice for a change?
SC: No. It was kind of fun. I have three brothers, and I have grown up more around boys than girls, so that's where it comes pretty easy for me. And I like the personalities of my brothers. They're very funny people. I mean, there's a serious tone to them, but they like humor. So it's nice to kind of pull from boys like that.
B&N.com: Do you have a favorite book you've written? Is there a character with whom you most identify?
SC: I know that most people expect me to say Walk Two Moons is my favorite, and it does have this special life all its own because of the Newbery, but it's sort of like if you had five children and someone said, "Which is your favorite?" You can't do it -- you can't choose. They're all so different, and there's this love that went into making each one of them. And as far as my characters, I think if you took the main character in each book and maybe the secondary character and put them all together, that would be me. Like in Walk Two Moons, Salamanca has a very lyrical voice, she's very calm, and yet there's a humorous edge to her. And Phoebe is this sort of wacky, off-the-wall, yackity person. But I'm like both of them at different times.
B&N.com: What kind of advice would you give to kids who say they want to be authors?
SC: Continue to read a lot and write a lot -- all different kinds of stuff, like plays, poems, and short stories -- and just experiment with different things. Kids shouldn't expect to have the whole story in their head before they begin. I think that's what scares so many people [away] from writing. But if you just start out with a person and a place and start thinking "Who do they know?" or "What would happen to them? What are they like?", if you just start describing all that, then the story will come. And it's OK to stop something and put it away for a couple of weeks and then go back to it. I think that's reassuring to a lot of children.
B&N.com: I recently spoke to Chris Raschka, and he told me you have a picture book coming out in the fall (which he illustrated). Tell me about that project.
SC: It's been the most fascinating process. I've never done a picture book before. I had given a talk somewhere, and in this talk, I told a story about going with my father when I was young to look for the house he was born in. We couldn't find the house, and later we went fishing, and while we were fishing, I sort of re-created the house in my mind. I could remember vividly this picture, this image, and after I gave this talk, one of the editors from HarperCollins said, "Have you ever thought of doing a picture book? Because it seems like that might make a great picture book story." So that's how I came to write Fishing in the Air. And it was about that time that I had met Chris Raschka at another conference where we were both speaking. He's so amazing, and I just remember thinking, "His brain is so incredible -- I want to work with that person!" When I turned the manuscript in to the editor, one of the first people she suggested as an illustrator was Chris Raschka, and I said, "Please, yes!" So he took on the project.
The book is about a father and a son, and they go fishing, and they're not just fishing for fish; the more important thing is that the father is transferring things in his imagination to the kid's imagination -- sort of like how we learn how to see the world through other people, like our parents. But most of the action in the book is mental -- the kid imagining things. And I'm sure that was one of the challenges for Chris -- how to illustrate that. But he has done this amazing thing where the book becomes very active in the middle -- just through the line and the way the characters are swirling around the page -- and he's been able to portray, visually, this action of the imagination. I think he's done a brilliant job.
B&N.com: What else are you working on now?
SC: I've just finished the fourth draft of a book called Ruby Holler. That's a name of a place in Kentucky. It's like a Bybanks kind of place -- but further out in the country. It's sort of weird how that book came about. It came from one line in a letter my aunt wrote to me. She was telling me a story about when my father was younger and she said, "I think that was when we lived in the Holler." And I thought, "They lived in the Holler? What Holler?" And then several months ago...some of my relatives have a family web site, and one of the pictures that somebody posted was the house in the Holler. And to me, it was just so terrific -- it's a falling-down cabin, and this great, big, huge family lived there for a time, probably during the Depression. I just had to write about this place. And out of that came this story of two kids -- a boy and a girl -- who hook up with an elderly pair, a grandparent-like man and woman. And the kids are very rough-edged and rambunctious, and the older people have this very humanizing effect on them -- and the place, the Holler, has this effect, a sort of tranquilizing effect, too.
B&N.com: What are some of your favorite children's books?
SC: Actually, I hadn't read very many before I received the Newbery. It was sort of like I came in through the back door to children's literature. I had studied and taught classic adult literature, and when I wrote Absolutely Normal Chaos,, which was about a 13-year-old, it was my agent who said, "You know I think that's a children's book." So I thought I'd better find out about children's books! And after Walk Two Moons received the Newbery, I thought, I really have to go back and read some of this stuff, because people were always asking me about my favorite children's books and authors. And I didn't know any. But now I have lots of favorites. Like Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Shiloh. Christopher Paul Curtis's books; I especially liked his first one, The Watsons Go to Birmingham. I like Patricia MacLachlan's Sarah, Plain and Tall. It's such a simple gem of a book. Katherine Paterson's books -- anything she's written I like. And Gail Carson Levine. I especially like Ella Enchanted.
