Changing Tide: Olive's Ocean by Kevin Henkes

It is Martha Boyle's twelfth summer, and she seems to be floating away on some strange tide. Her thoughts keep turning to the sad story of Olive Barstow, a shy, almost reclusive classmate, who was suddenly killed in traffic only a few weeks before. How can someone only twelve be dead?

As Martha's family travel to visit her grandmother Godbee at her home on the Cape shore, nothing seems the same and nothing seems right. Godbee, always to Martha "strong, smart, pretty, protective, safe, and yes, brave," admits that things are not the same for her, either. What she has been is slipping away, she confides to Martha in their daily truth-telling time. Her brother Vince, who was always there like a best friend, spends most of his time with his friends. And the Manning boys, her brother's vacation buddies, the ones she always hated because they teased her and drew her brother away from their usual vacation games--now one of the Mannings has kissed her and one of the Mannings has proven that he is the one who cares about her.

As Martha struggles to the surface of her new world, she fills a jar with ocean water for Olive, who wrote in her journal that she longed to see the ocean. When Martha returns home, she tries to take the ocean water to Olive's mother, but Mrs. Barstow has left and gone away, and all Martha can do is write Olive's name in sea water on her doorstep. Writ in water, Olive and Martha's childhood are both gone, and Martha goes back home to begin the rest of her life.

Kevin Henkes, whose most famous female character had been Lily of Lily's Purple Plastic Purse, has shown that he knows how to get inside the feminine mind once again. In Martha, Henkes has perfectly captured the borderline between childhood and maturity and a girl's first steps over that line.

Looking Back: Penny from Heaven

Jennifer Holm's Newbery Honor book Penny from Heaven finds more sunshine than showers as she recreates the summer of her mother's twelfth birthday in 1953. Although surrounded by affection from the large, warm Italian-American family on her father's side, and the more reticent but loving care of her mother and grandparents, Penny senses that there is some painful secret buried in the division between them, a secret which is tied to her father's early death.

In the summer of 1953, all Penny wants to do is swim at the pool, listen to the Brooklyn Dodgers' games, and eat plenty of butter pecan ice cream. But polio threatens at the pool, her widowed mother is actually enjoying being courted (to Penny's intense embarrassment) by the milkman, her cousin Frankie is arrested, Penny is hurt in a life-changing accident, and her favorite uncle, Dominic, is no longer around to be her surrogate dad.

In the hospital where her mother trained as a nurse, Penny hears bits and pieces of her father's story and forces a confrontation with both sides of her family to gain an explanation. Out of the airing of the long-repressed story of how he died, Penny understands her family's pain and even comes to acceptance of Murphy the milkman as a step dad. As the song goes,

If you want the things you love,
You must have showers.

Penny from Heaven is a wonderful story of family love in the immediate postwar years, a time when the scars from World War II are still painful, especially in an Italian-American family which remembers being stigmatized as enemy aliens. Penny's family has to make their own separate peace before those scars can heal, and as her father's daughter, Penny has to be the one to begin the process.