By Sharon Creech
Sal crosses the country with her grandparents to reach the place her mother went, telling a friend's story the whole way to keep from telling her own.
Thirteen-year-old Salamanca Tree Hiddle is riding across the country with her grandparents, headed for the place her mother went and never came home from. To fill the long hours in the car, Sal tells them about her friend Phoebe Winterbottom, whose mother also disappeared one day, and whose tidy street suddenly filled up with anonymous notes and a stranger everyone called a lunatic. Phoebe's story keeps running right alongside Sal's own, the one Sal isn't ready to tell out loud. It's funny and strange and full of doubling back, and underneath all of it Sal is driving toward something she already knows and can't quite let herself say.
This is one of the most tightly built books on the trail, and it belongs with a child who has already read the plainer grief stories and is ready for one that hides its sadness inside a mystery and a comedy. Creech folds Phoebe's story inside Sal's so neatly that for most of the book your child is enjoying the puzzle and the grandparents, who are genuinely funny company. Then the two stories fold together and the grief you didn't see building arrives all at once. It hits harder than a book that told you up front where it was going, because everything before it was quietly setting it up.