Sharon Creech: The Words We Choose to Say (review)

Don't judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccasins.

With these words from a fortune cookie Sharon Creech burst onto the American Children's Literature stage, winning the 1995 Newbery Medal with her tale of Salamanca Tree Hiddle in Walk Two Moons. Seven years later she became the first Newbery winner to also win the United Kingdom's Carnegie Medal when Ruby Holler was accorded that honor. Firmly established by these and numerous other critically acclaimed works, Creech is a natural subject for one of the biocritical titles in the Scarecrow Studies in Young Adult Literature series. Mary Ann Tighe offers this study in volume 22, Sharon Creech: The Words We Choose to Say.

Tighe, a self-avowed "loyal fan," first discovered Creech's work through Chasing Redbird, noting "I think I was especially drawn to the book because of its setting and the words she chose to say about Zinny Taylor's home in Bybanks, Kentucky. This small town, located in the Appalachian Mountains, reminded me of the area where I grew up in western Pennsylvania. As Zinny and her Uncle Nate explored the trails and woods surrounding her family home, I joined in her adventures, remembering the many times my friends and I had hiked through the Allegheny Mountains under the leadership of my favorite uncle" (vii). This very personal connection to the author and her works combined with a paucity of scholarly writing on Creech has lead Tighe to create a study at once extensive yet curiously incomplete.

Sharon Creech: The Words We Choose to Say follows the pattern of other biocritical studies in the Scarecrow series: a preface explaining the author's connection to the subject of the study, a chronology outlining major events in the subject's life, a biographical chapter, chapters critically exploring the subject's writing and a handful of useful appendices. As is clear through numerous endnotes and the exhaustive bibliography of primary and secondary works further divided into eleven different types of resources, Tighe thoroughly researched all available published materials on Creech. Such attention to detail is clearly a strength, for it provides researchers with a significant overview of works by and about Creech and serves as a springboard for further study.

Although Tighe has been meticulous and her overview comprehensive, her resources lack the substance serious researchers would expect to find on a Newbery/Carnegie Medal winner. Sharon Creech is briefly covered in Something about the Author, Seventh Book of Junior Authors and Illustrators and similar reference texts, as well as through interviews in such major publications as Horn Book, Reading Teacher and Teacher Librarian, yet Creech herself resisted a personal interview with Tighe. As such the biographical portion of this biocritical study relies on a single email interview between Tighe and Creech in addition to the resources cited above, the material available on Creech's Website and the interviews conducted primarily after Creech won the Newbery and Carnegie Medals. Tighe articulately synthesizes these sources and summarizes the facts of Creech's life, but, perhaps because of the constraints Tighe worked under, she gives us no new perspective on Creech's life nor the impact her life has had on her work. Tighe's readers have no opportunity to glimpse Creech from a different angle nor peer at her writing through an altered lens.

The critical portion of Tighe's biocritical study suffers from a similar flaw. Tighe effectively groups Creech's major texts into three thematic chapters: "A Reflection of Reality: Absolutely Normal Chaos and Bloomability"; "The Journey: Walk Two Moons and The Wanderer"; and "A Touch of Fantasy: Chasing Redbird and Ruby Holler." Each of these chapters successfully mingles summaries of the texts with their critical responses, drawing parallels between narrators, plots, settings, characters, styles, themes, and more. Yet the critical responses consist primarily of brief reviews, sometimes unsigned, not critical studies from a variety of theoretical perspectives, again leaving Tighe's readers yearning for more substance.

Tighe certainly couldn...