Spoiler-free summary: Martha is a twelve-year-old from Madison, Wisconsin, about to leave for her family’s annual trip to her grandmother’s home on Cape Cod, when she’s given a page from the journal of a classmate named Olive who died in an accident earlier that summer. She barely knew Olive, but the entry says that Olive wanted to visit the ocean, become a writer, and be friends with Martha. Her visit to her grandmother’s is a growing experience, with Martha thinking about death, love, and becoming a writer herself. A beautiful and melancholy book, older in themes than the average Newbery book.
Discussion: The opening chapters in this about Martha being given Olive’s journal entry are a great hook – it feels like something a writing teacher would give a class as a prompt for a story. Many of the stories that would come out of it, though, would probably center around Martha trying to figure out who Olive really was and why she picked Martha as the nicest girl in the class, and I think Olive’s Ocean is better for not going down that road. Olive is gone, we’ll never know.
The journal page does color the entire book, though. It’s got a feeling of sadness throughout it, with Olive’s death, with the thoughts of Godbee’s mortality, and with the near-drowning at the end. Even the section about young love with Jimmy is cut short and ends in tears. The payoff of a sad book is that an ending with a little bit of hope feels truly happy. Martha hasn’t written her novel yet, or really anything she’s especially proud of yet, but she’s called herself a writer and her dad accepts it. Tate likes her, and she might get to see him and Godbee over Christmas. And Olive’s mom has moved away, so she doesn’t get to deliver her gift, but she does get to bring the ocean back to Madison for Olive, and maybe that’s better anyway.
I don’t plan to make the comparison with the Newbery winner for every book entry. If nothing else, even just a few years out from reading them all, there are some that my memory is pretty hazy on. But I really loved this one, and I’m sure I would have been pulling for it over The Tale of Despereaux if I had been following the Newbery at the time. As proof, my choice for the 2024 Newbery was another sad-but-hopeful book about a middle schooler thinking about death on Cape Cod, The Labors of Hercules Beal.
Next up, the first of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books that won an Honor, On the Banks of Plum Creek.
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