BookDragon Blog

Martha Boyle opens her front door one day to find the mother of her dead classmate, Olive Barstow, with what seems to be almost a message from beyond. Olive, a girl too new in town to have made any close connections, has died a few weeks ago in a car accident. Her understandably distraught mother, reading her dead daughter’s journal, finds a page that names Martha as “the nicest person in my whole entire class.” She delivers that pink folded page to Martha, which reveals Olive’s “Hopes”: to be a writer, her longing to someday see the “real” ocean, and her “biggest hope” to be friends with Martha. “[H]olding a piece of paper that had come from the journal of someone her own age, someone now dead,” in just minutes, Martha’s life is somehow now “different – altered.”

Martha is on her way with her family for their annual summer break on the Cape at her grandmother Godbee’s house, “Martha’s favorite place in the world.” This year, Martha’s summer is especially memorable: she exchanges one secret a day with beloved Godbee, helps one of the five neighbor Manning boys with his film project unknowingly in exchange for a first kiss, and eventually realizes that she, too, is certain she would like to be a writer one day.

In between moments of (sometimes bittersweet) summer discovery, Martha is reminded of Olive, whom she comes to know better now that she is gone. And she figures out how she might bring Olive her ocean after all …

Lightly written, although never making light of serious issues, Ocean (a 2004 Newbery Honor Book for Kevin Henkes, and deservedly so) is a haunting read about a young girl quickly approaching maturity. Dealing suddenly with the death of someone so young, Martha realizes the reality of not only her own mortality, but also that of her aging, nurturing grandmother who surely cannot be around forever, summer after blissful summer. Indeed, it’s a gentle, short book to be savored, whether you’re 12, 21, or even 81.

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2003