SarahJanet's Books

Olive's Ocean

Kevin Henkes is the author of many picture book favourites, including the ever worrying Wemberly and Lily's Purple Plastic Purse. This is the first novel of his that I've read, and I went into it not really knowing what to expect.

One of my bad habits as a reader is not taking into account the expected reading level of the audience. This book is another of the YRCA choices for this year, in the junior category (aimed at grades 4-6.), and I need to remember that when I read these books. I was kind of anticipating a book with a little more meat to it, but I think my expectations were a little unreasonable for a novel aimed at ten-year-olds.

In a lot of ways, Olive's Ocean was kind of generic. Young girl (12, a classic age for books of this sort - it's the perfect angst age of not yet a teenager, but well into the double digits) who wants to be a writer (they all do at this age, and while I appreciate it since I too wanted to be a writer from age 4 through, well, now, it's still pretty overdone. Not every adolescent girl wants to be a writer.) goes to visit her grandmother for the summer. Now, the grandmother's house on the ocean is also a classic device in this stories, and while the grandmother, Godbee, is more interesting than some fictional grandmas, her story isn't fleshed out in any interesting way.

Martha, the main character, struggles with the death of a classmate, but not in any way that's interesting. Olive wasn't someone she cared about, wasn't someone she knew, and while it's interesting in theory to contemplate the death of a stranger, and the idea of the guilt that haunts you when someone you ignored died, we had no way to become attached to Olive in any way, and it was less effective for us to see Martha struggling with it when we had no concept of the person who died.

Overall, I think it was a book that had a lot of potential, but rather than expand on its promise and turn it into a book for slightly older readers, Henkes settled for the simpler story, and as a result, left me wanting to know more about his characters.

posted by SarahJanet @ 3:19 PM