The Wanderer by Sharon Creech

I wish Sharon Creech was my aunt. Or my next door neighbor or my piano teacher. I don't need to be her intimate friend or anything, but I would like to be invited into her house so that I could look around at her books and the pictures on her walls and the objects on her shelves and get an every-so-often glimpse of life through her eyes.

The Wanderer is a YA novel about Sophie, a young girl who is driven to go to sea with three of her uncles and two of her cousins. They are going to sail from the United States to England to visit her Bompie, who is in failing health. (Bompie is Grandpa--Creech's use of the pet-name only intensifies my longing to know her, maybe to get a look at her shoe collection after I've seen the living room.)

The book is told from two points of view, first Sophie's and then her young cousin Cody's, as they write about their grand adventure in their respective journals. At first, Cody's entries were just pages to get through to return to Sophie, but then something happens. Cody tells missing pieces of Sophie's story; a story that he himself does not completely know.

I read another of Creech's novels , Bloomability, a few years ago. As I read the parts of The Wanderer told by Cody, I thought of Bloomability and what I liked so much about it. In The Wanderer, Creech gives Cody so much empathy for the other characters--she lets the reader look at the main characters through the lens of another character--and tints the chosen lens with such love and goodwill and wonder towards humanity that it buttresses my faith in the human race.

I am going to read this lovely story to my oldest son when his current read aloud ends. I hope books like The Wanderer help to keep his heart tender as he navigates his childhood and beyond.