Louisiana's Way Home

Louisiana's Way Home
By Kate DiCamillo
Candlewick Press, 2018. Fiction.

Louisiana Elefante, daughter of the famous Flying Elefantes trapeze duo, lives with her granny in Florida until the night her granny wakes her in the middle of the night to tell her they're leaving immediately - and forever. Granny has been told in a dream that the day of reckoning has arrived and they need to journey to break their family curse. Their nighttime road trip is derailed when Granny has a dental emergency that requires the removal of all of her teeth and leaves the two in Richford, Georgia, far from Louisiana's. When Louisiana finds her granny gone one day, leaving a note behind, it starts to seem that she'll never find her way back home.

Louisiana is a character readers first encountered in RAYMIE NIGHTINGALE (2016) but this book can still easily stand-alone. Kate DiCamillo is a two-time Newbery Award winning author well known for introducing distinctive characters and Louisiana is no exception - she is humorous, astute, and behaves much like a real child in a terrible situation would behave. This book is Kate DiCamillo at her best with excellent character development, tight, terse writing, and plenty of quirky townspeople in tow.

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