Louisiana's Way Home by Kate DiCamillo

Louisiana's Way Home by Kate DiCamillo is a beautiful, at the same time pretty intense children's book, where sentiments, human conditions are displayed pretty vividly and vibrantly.
To me this character is new and I was so happy of being approved by Candlewick for reading this book. It will be released this October 2.
As I said you, thematic that your children will find in this book are very important and serious.
The story is just apparently light.
The opening: the granny of Louisiana Elefante must leave at 3 o'clock of the night; her family has been cursed decades ago and this curse generation after generation follows her. It's a honest and serious curse, you see. Louisiana must follows her.
Louisiana is sad because at home she left two friends, a dog with an eye and her cat.
In a way or in another they are " interrupted" on the road by lack of..gasoline and sore tooth.
Her granny needs a dentist.
The dentist will remove the tooth and later a motel will be indispensable for her for recovering.
In the while Louisiana meets another kid; someone named Burke Allen. Everyone in his family was named Burke Allen; his dad, his grand-dad, his great-grand-dad, so substantially if Louisiana is unique and she will continue to live with her unicity also thanks to her name, Burke goes on with a perennial repetition of the same name per generations and generations. Yes, there was some lack of originality in the Allen's family. He lives in a pink house where his mother bakes delicious cakes, diversifying every day.
Burke's got a crow, Clarence, affectionate to Louisiana. The kids climb on trees together; Burke is nice; he feeds her thanks to a vendor machine in the motel and some...tricks; one day, the granny of Louisiana leaves the motel. Alone. Well, with the car. Toothless and still in pain.
Why did she leave her behind?
She left a letter for Louisiana.
A long letter with a shocking explanation. They're not related. She rescued her, abandoned by unknown people, she grew her up.
The important thematic of being abandoned, adopted, and the research of identity passes also through the idea that, that granny who stayed close to Louisiana, who grew her up, is now like a stranger. In a blink of  eyes, the kid had to cope with a reality more big than what she would have imagined and with nasty, confused sensations and feelings about her "granny." And her identity.
Speaking of this story with a priest and with the family of Burke, she will discover that after all it's not important who she is related with and who her parents or relatives are but who she is and who she wants to become.
And Louisiana will find her way.
The title of this book "Louisiana's Way Home"  is a metaphor of home, intended not just like a building (although there is a beautiful happy end) but like the emotive, and rational sphere one, that Louisiana discovers and will build along her way, accepting her past, embracing the present and her future.

Intense, dreaming highly recommended for sure to everyone!

I thank NetGalley and Candlewick for the eBook.

Anna Maria Polidori

Photo Credit: Candlewick Press.