Olives Ocean

Kevin Henkes

217 pages

In the novel, Olive’s Ocean, by Kevin Henkes a girl named Martha finds out that a girl she went to school with died, leaving a diary entry saying she wished she could be more like Martha. The book is all about the summertime after Martha’s classmate died. Martha spends the summer at her grandmother’s house with her mother, father, older brother and little sister. She dwells on the girl that died whose name was Olive. She even wants to take a small jar of water from the Ocean back to Olive’s mother, but when she returns home she finds out that Olive’s mother had moved. It was at her grandmother’s house that Martha gets her first kiss, decides to become a writer and learns to appreciate her life. She goes back home at the end of summer ready to start school again and ready to live her own life after finally saying a proper goodbye to Olive by painting her name on the front porch with the sea water.