From: Kathleen Horning <horning>
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 16:25:00 -600

I want to follow up on two of the questions Perry raised near the end of his eloquent response regarding "Names in Walk Two Moons" (posted 7/16).

The first is his question about when exactly the story is to have taken place. While I agree with Carla and Nina that the story is contemporary (for the reasons they have cited), I also agree with Perry that there is a sense of timelessness about the story. I wonder if this might have something to do with the fact that most the story is set "on the road," -- in that vast "no-where/no-time" between here and there, yesterday and tomorrow. During these days when she's cooped up in a car with her grandparents, separated from her day-to?y life, Sal has time to remember, reflect, distill and retell everything important that's happened to her in the past year.

I don't think the book ever strives for outward social realism. It's more about internal reality (which harkens back to something Perry said earlier about the book's central concern: that we know so little of each other's interior lives). For this reason, I found it somewhat perplexing when earlier in the year WTM criticised as "new realism" (whatever that is -- I knew what it was 20 years ago -- is it the same thing and if so do we still call it new?)

The second question Perry raised related to children's responses to the book. Does anyone out there have anything they can share related to child readers of WTM?
                            --KT Horning
                              CCBC, UW-Madison
Received on Thu 20 Jul 1995 05:25:00 PM CDT