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Published by Atheneum, New York
Copyright 1983
Library of Congress Catalog Card 82-16315 - ISBN 0-689-30953-8
Eleven year old Nena doesn't particularly want her grandfather, Hugo, poking around in her head but that's what everyone says poets do so when he looks into her eyes she stares him down. She's come to spend a year with this old cowboy, so like her and her mother, in a ramshackle trailer court inhabited by eccentrics that sits on the edge of a California beach. The beach is great for handsprings but the ocean's overwhelming and she knows she will never set foot in it, no matter how much her grandfather encourages and Irving, whose mother runs the restaurant, teases. As far as Nena is conccerned, the beach and trailer court form a narrow safety zone between an ocean where she'd drown and sand dunes where she'd get lost and buried.
Hugo's trailer is an even more chaotic mess than Mom's apartment but once he buys her a trailer of her own she makes herself an orderly haven. Everything is different from life in New York --- the country school, Irving and the other trailer court weirdos, Hugo living on raw liver and onion juice prepared in a filthy osterizer. But, bit by bit, Nena finds that Grandfather Hugo and the trailer court provide more of a home than she's ever known. And Irving proves to be her best friend.
Then everything changes --- again. Hugo gets sick and is hauled off to a hospital he's sure will be the death of him. Nena enlists Irving and their neighbor Doggit to help her liberate Hugo one dark night. She'll nurse him. Nena finds she can do many things she'd feared impossible, if they help someone she loves, even swim in the ocean. |
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