Northward to the Moon (review)

In My One Hundred Adventures (BCCB 10/08), Jane and her family lived comfortably, if eccentrically, in their house on the Massachusetts beach; now they're just leaving Saskatchewan, their home of almost a year, and Jane's stepfather, Ned, wants them to roam wherever fancy takes them. It's not fancy but family that directs their travels, however, as they first get word about Ned's scapegrace brother and then visit Ned's long-estranged mother, Dorothy, on her Nevada ranch. There they adjust to their reconfigured family model, stretching further when Ned's sisters arrive after Dorothy suffers an accident, but Jane still yearns for her Massachusetts home. While My One Hundred Adventures was comparatively conventional for Horvath, this sequel, with its wandering and its continual surprises, is an embrace of her longstanding themes: the balance between restlessness and desire for home, between the need for family and the absence of custom and certainty. While familiarity with the previous book will help enrich the references to backstory, it's not necessary (save that some new readers may mistakenly think that some events would appear less random with more context, when the context would merely prove that they're random). Jane has a cool, thoughtful, and wry narrative voice, but she's also capable of self-deception and misunderstanding, and her self-containment relates as much to her powerless kid status—she's distanced because it's an adult mess that she's been dragged into—as it does to her personality. The twists may surprise readers unaccustomed to Horvath logic, but even novices to her world will warm to Jane's strange, unpredictable, and oddly beautiful family story.