My Further Adventures: Northward to the Moon by Polly Horvath

"I don't know, Maya," Ned said tiredly. "I don't know why John left a bag of money in the forests of British Columbia. I don't know why my father just up and left our family one day. I don't know why my mother decided to hightail it up to Fort McMurray. I don't know why Ben stole the money and stranded Dorothy. I'm telling you, I don't know why anyone does anything. People do strange things.

In Polly Horvath's third book in her tales of Jane, beginning with the Newbery Award Everything on a Waffle and continuing through My One Hundred Adventures, Jane has found it unncessary to gin up her own adventures; in fact, unsought adventures threaten to overwhelm her! Her step-dad Ned has moved the whole family from their beloved beach-front cottage in Massachusetts to the drab and dry high prairie of Saskatchewan to teach high school French, a language of which he has no knowledge and the lack of which gets him fired in mid-term.

Jane hopes that the family will return to their seaside house, but Ned immediately drags the family through a side trip to visit a dying Indian woman named Mary who is asking for him. Because she once took him in as a homeless teenager, Ned feels compelled to go to her home in the woods of Nova Scotia, but once there, he finds out that Mary only wants to give him a sackful of money left for him by his elusive brother John.

With the money, Jane's mom Felicity, her sister Maya and little brothers in tow, Ned drives their ricketty car back to Las Vegas, his brother's last known address to return the cash. Although they find John gone to points unknown, Ned does learn that his mother is nearby, living on a horse ranch near Elko, Nevada, and they drive there, hoping to unravel the mystery of the money. But soon after their arrival, Ned's mother Dorothy is thrown from her horse and suffers an injury which requires Ned and his long-lost sisters to come together to sell her ranch and provide for her long-term care. Then Dorothy's trusted hired hand steals the money and the whole family finds themselves with Dorothy and little money retracing their steps back to their small cottage in Massachusetts. Thirteen-year-old Jane, who has felt the family's tenuous hold on reality during the whole venture, at last relaxes.

When we got back to the beach it is a wonderful salty homecoming. The moist air makes me come alive. I can feel it seeping into all my pores, which were shriveled in the desert dryness. It is as if I can finally breathe all over my body again. It is like a miracle to hear the waves crash and recede, crash and recede.

Ned finds a job teaching and translating Japanese, a language which he turns out actually to know quite well, and with Dorothy in a local convalescent home and Maya apparently emerging from her long depression, it looks as if the family has come home at last.

If Horvath's theme is that life is an unforeseeable journey, not a destination, this book certainly proves the case. Jane's observations are clear-eyed and real, and her drive to make sense out of her quirky family's doings comes to little even in the book's final words:

The next day Ned is gone.

He left a note.

But oh, what a journey the year's wanderings make in Horvath's latest, Northward to the Moon (Schwarz & Wade, 2010). A family uprooted, yet bound by close but inexplicable bonds, owning so little but with enough love to make any place a home wherever they are together, their life is a continuing adventure, and this novel is surely not the end of Jane's story.

Don't Expect Happy Endings: Sarah Simpson's Rules for Living by Rebecca Rupp

Sarah Simpson's Rules for Living

1. Don't lie.
2. Don't trust anybody but cats.
3. Don't expect happy endings.
4. Drink skim milk.
5. Avoid blondes.

Sarah Simpson is always making lists, for herself and for everyone she knows, whether she likes them or not, so when she gets a diary for Christmas from her aunt, she decides to put it to use as a combination journal and list of lists. But first she introduces herself, and we realize that Sarah is a girl with no illusions.

My name is Sarah Simpson. I have orange hair and I am fat.

With that flat statement, that is the last we hear about those issues.

But Sarah has other biggies on her list. Her dad moved out on the previous New Year's Day to marry his "soul mate" Kim, whom Sarah perceptively describes as "having long blond hair she's always flinging around to make sure that everybody notices that she has long blond hair." Her mom Sally has a non-boyfriend boyfriend named Jonah with whom Sarah also find much fault (singing "We Shall Overcome," wearing shirts printed with sea horses, being bald and bearded, among others), and Sarah herself seems to have no friends at all, unless you count dorky Horace Zimmerman who plays Hades to Sarah's Persephone in the school play.

On the anniversary of her father's departure for California with the aforementioned Kim, Sarah makes her own list of New Year's resolutions:

1. Get rid of Kim.
2. Get rid of Jonah.
3. Dye my hair.
4. Move to Australia.

Sarah's yearly nadir comes when, overwhelmed with her own need for her mother's full attention, Sarah tells Jonah's five-year-old son George that his dead mother is not, as he believes, a twinkling star in the sky, just dead and buried and gone. Surprisingly it's Horace Zimmerman who finally consoles George and corrects Sarah as he tells them that all humans really are made of elements from exploding supernovas, so that in a way we are all made from from stars. It's a new cosmic view for Sarah.

As the year progresses, Sarah's wry lists are replaced by new ones which journal the changes in her life. Despite herself, things start looking up, and it seems Sarah won't be going to Australia any time soon. As her closing journal entry says,

Back in January, I felt like my life was over and nothing would ever be happy again. Now I think I was full of crap. Sally says I'm growing up. Horace thinks I'm developing a political conscience. Jonah says time has a way of healing all kinds of wounds. George thinks it has something to do with stars and bears. I'm not sure. But for right now, I'm hoping for the best.

OTHER THINGS I'VE LEARNED THIS YEAR SO FAR

1. It's what you are, not what you look like, that's important.
2. Poeple can make a difference.
3. Things that fall apart have a way of coming back together again.
4. We're all made of little bits of stars.

5. Even Kim.

Sarah Simpson's Rules for Living is a slim little chronicle of a frank and funny girl who, like Persephone (whom she plays in an unbecoming pillowcase toga, with toilet tissue flowers encircling her hair) finds her way out of her own black hole and into something like the spring in her seventh-grade year.