Northward to the Moon
My One Hundred Adventures Series
Jane and her family have moved to Canada... but not for long.
When her stepfather, Ned, is fired from his job as a high school French teacher (seems he doesn’t speak French), the family packs up and Jane embarks on a series of new adventures.
At first, she imagines her family as a gang of outlaws, riding on horseback in masks, robbing trains, and traveling all the way to Mexico.
But the reality is different: Setting off by car, they visit the tribe of Native Americans with whom Ned once lived, head to Las Vegas in search of Ned’s magician brother, and wind up spending the summer with his eccentric mother on her ranch out west.
As Jane lives through it all—developing a crush on a ranch hand, reevaluating her relationship with Ned, watching her sister Maya’s painful growing up—she sees her world, which used to be so safe and secure, shift in strange and inconvenient ways.
About the My One Hundred Adventures Series
Books in series order
- 1.My One Hundred Adventures(2008)
- 2.Northward to the Moon(2010)
Reading age: 9+ years
This series should be read in order.
You can hear the waves crash more loudly when it is dark. You can smell the sharper smells of the sea. Maybe the wind will take us this time, I think, as a gust shakes the foundations of the house. Maybe we will be blown apart to the many corners of the earth, but then I feel a sharp stab of something, excitement maybe. It is the prospect of adventures to be had.
Jane is 12 years old, and she is ready for adventures, to move beyond the world of her siblings and single mother and their house by the sea, and step into the “know-not what.” And, over the summer, adventures do seem to find Jane, whether it’s a thrilling ride in a hot-air balloon, the appearances of a slew of possible fathers, or a weird new friendship with a preacher and psychic wannabe. Most important, there’s Jane’s discovery of what lies at the heart of all great adventures: that it’s not what happens to you that matters, but what you learn about yourself.