Olive's Ocean

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Olive's Ocean
Author	Kevin Henkes
Illustrator	Kevin Henkes
Cover artist	Kevin Henkes
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Fiction
Publisher	HarperCollins
Publication date	2003
Media type	Hardback
Pages	217
ISBN	ISBN 0-06-053544-X

Olive's Ocean is a 2003 book by Kevin Henkes that won the 2004 Newbery Honor. Dora

[edit] Plot

The book is centered around twelve year old Martha Boyle. Her fellow classmate Olive Barstrow had just died after being hit by a car while riding her bike. Olive's mother shows up at Martha's front door handing her a piece of Olive's writing from her journal. It says Olive wants to be a writer and she wants to get to know Martha more. Martha's family leaves for Cape Cod the next day to visit her grandmother. Martha's father is Mr. Boyle (a novelist), and her mother is Mrs. Hubbard who works on the radio. Martha also has a 13 year old brother named Vince and a two year old sister named Lucy. Before leaving for the trip Martha had decided to be a novelist like her father. She didn't want to tell her family because she thought they would think she was copying her father. But she plans to tell them before they leave their grandmother's house. The Manning's live next door to Martha's grandmother's house. They have five boys in different age groups, Martha had wanted to see Tate Manning. But instead she meets Jimmy (the oldest) who is making a movie about different things. Martha sees what Jimmy has got so far on his tape. Jimmy tells her that he needs to film the death part and love part still. Meanwhile she and her grandmother have promised each other to tell something about themselves everyday and Martha is working on her story about a girl named Olive. Her dad stressed out at the dinner table once and decided to stop working on his book and does another type of work. As Jimmy and Martha hangout time after time Martha begins to like Jimmy. Then one night Jimmy sets up his video camera and kisses Martha. She then realizes Jimmy was just using her for his tape. Then when on the beach with her little sister she sees Jimmy holding hands with another girl. She then almost drowns in the ocean. At the end of the vacation Martha now has a stronger relationship with her grandmother. Tate had promised to be there before Martha left, but doesn't show up. Right when the car was leaving he comes running after it. They stop the car and Tate gives Martha a brown bag than runs off. In the bag is Jimmy's tape and a note saying along the lines of that Jimmy was gonna kill him and that he had been the one who really liked her. The end said P.S.S. Really. On the plane ride back she writes a letter to Olive's mother, but discovers that Olive's mother had moved. She visits where Olive and her mother used to live and talks to a man about why she moved. When the man leaves, she writes Olive on the bench where Olive always sat using a jar of water she brought back from the ocean. Then she runs home to her family as fast as her body can take her.

[edit] Olive's Ocean

The name of the book is derived from the baby food jar of ocean water that Martha called Olive's ocean. The water was obtained by Martha on her Massachusetts vacation when she visited her grandmother, who lives near the beach. The idea came from one of her grandmother's stories in which a person lives at an ocean and has to leave but doesn't want to so they brought a bottle of ocean water home. Martha, who is also a writer, takes the idea into one of her stories about a particular Olive.