#3: Olive’s Ocean by Kevin Henkes

A life-altering recommendation from my sixth grade Language Arts teacher.

Olive’s Ocean by Kevin Henkes is a critically important text in my personal childhood canon. It was at the top of my list to revisit for this project, though unlike others I’ve covered so far it’s not one I returned to and reread many times. In fact, I think I may have only read it the one time, though I was always acutely aware of being in possession of it, moving from one house to another and sitting on a shelf in my parents’ library before I finally picked it back up again earlier this year.

Olive’s Ocean was sacred to me because it was given to me by Mrs. Ryan, my sixth grade Language Arts teacher. I rarely met an English teacher I didn’t get along with, but Mrs. Ryan was particularly special to me. I loved her and her class at a time when, privately, I didn’t like much. I’ve sometimes thought that was the first year I experienced what I would come to know as depression, though a lot of what I felt was obviously typical of puberty. Of course, to me I felt uniquely and dramatically wrong. The way I looked on the outside did not match who I felt I was on the inside, and who I felt I was on the inside seemed too grand and mature for middle school. I frequently felt out of step with my family and misunderstood at home. I remember times when I suddenly felt so angry I would go out back and slam a basketball against the backboard, over and over again, as hard as I could, just to make it rattle. Other times I felt so scooped out and tired I would sit on a chair in the living room, completely still and staring into the middle distance. I didn’t make any sense to myself, and I felt alone in it.

So on the day before class started when Mrs. Ryan said “I think you would like this book,” I was desperate, desperate to be seen. Maybe she just gave it to me because I was a well-known bookworm. She never gave me any other books, and I don’t remember her giving any to other classmates, or even getting other reading recommendations from her outside the curriculum. To me, being handed Olive’s Ocean was a singular act of divine intervention, of being noticed and understood by an adult I respected and admired.

In a powerful instance of life imitating art that I didn’t recall until I re-opened the book this year, this hand-off from Mrs. Ryan is not unlike the inciting incident of Henkes’s book. Protagonist Martha Boyle is given a diary entry belonging to her classmate Olive Barstow, who was killed in a car accident weeks before. Martha and Olive didn’t know each other well, and Martha is floored by how the quiet girl saw her (“She is the nicest person in my entire class”), as well as struck by the similarities between them that she’d never known about.

There were a lot of similarities between Martha and me, too. She’s twelve years old, the same age I was when I first read the book, and she wants to be a writer, something she doesn’t know how to articulate but holds in grave significance. She only has two siblings to my three, but like me she has a brother close in age with whom she shared a room with for many years and is still close, despite the increasing differences between them as they grow up. She also has a baby sister that she adores, right around the same age my adored baby sister was when I was reading it. Like my family, Martha’s family went on an annual beach vacation, and though mine wasn’t a visit to a grandparent’s house I do have very special memories and traditions with my grandparents from our trips to the shore. I even also had a scary semi-near-death moment in the ocean like Martha does, which was the moment I remembered most when I went to returned to the book years later.

I didn’t remember much else about Olive’s Ocean before re-reading. I had forgotten all about Olive Barstow and Martha’s sudden, ill-fated crush on Jimmy Manning and her pact to trade secrets with her grandmother (of everything, her grandma’s confession that she hates her hands for looking like “ugly, pink, crippled crabs” gave me the biggest sense of déjà vu, for some reason). But my lasting impression that this book captured something essential about being a twelve-year-old girl (and about twelve-year-old Mary Kate) proved correct. It actually made my heart ache, how easily I could remember feeling all the things Martha felt. Her frustrations with her parents, particularly her inexplicable and unfair inability to get along with her mother. The awful embarrassment trying to fit in with peers or impress an older kid only to have her vulnerability thrown into her face. (Not to mention the sudden, all-encompassing obsession of a new crush.) The abrupt and confusing sense of her own mortality and the mortality of those around her. Even the list of cringeworthy opening lines for the story Martha never fully gets around to writing—I’ve got about a dozen notebooks under the bed at my parents’ house filled with fragments equally ridiculous.

Henkes’s writing is deft at treating even Martha’s most juvenile thoughts and feelings with the utmost importance and sincerity, and I remember, at that time, wanting my jumble of thoughts and feelings to be taken seriously.  Martha’s feelings about her mom—which “bounced between love and hate quickly and without warning, as if her feelings were illogical, willful, and completely out of Martha’s control”—applied to so much I felt about everything at that time. How strange and revelatory for those feelings to be mirrored back to me, then mirrored again in Martha’s thoughts about Olive.

My other lasting impression from Olive’s Ocean, besides the crab hands, was Martha’s near-drowning. I remembered it being impactful and profound. Reading it now, the scene was way more brief and abrupt of a gear-shift than I expected, perhaps not even significant enough to really call it a near-drowning. Martha emerges from the water with the perfect clarity that “the world doesn’t revolve around her,” which feels a little too easy for a book that thrives in the not-so-easy space of adolescence. If there’s one critique I have for the story, it’s that it falls back on clichés to get the critical plot points across. (Another example: Why did Jimmy have to kiss Martha for a bet? It feels like it should be enough disappointment that he only did so for the movie he’s filming, rather than because he liked her.) Then again, Martha’s narration is honest about her feelings being utterly changeable. Can I blame her for coming out of her dramatic, private pre-teen baptism with a brand new outlook on life?

Truthfully, I can’t critique too much about this book. It means too much to me, and I still see too much of myself in it. The material holds up, in my completely biased opinion. There are a million and one books about the pubescent coming-of-age, but to this day I’ve never read one that reflected my own inner world so exactly. I felt seen reading it as an adult, just as I felt seen reading it at twelve. Just as I felt seen when Mrs. Ryan handed it to me forever ago, the reason why I clung to it all these years.

I do mean clung to it: I don’t know that Mrs. Ryan intended to give me this book as a gift. She never asked for it, but I did mean to give it back. I thought I would after I finished reading, or at the end of the school year, or right before eighth grade graduation. I meant to tell her how much I loved it and how grateful I was she shared it with me, but I never did. Maybe it was too raw for too long to articulate my thoughts. Maybe I just really wanted it to live on my shelf the way it lived in my heart. In any case, it’s a decade and a half later, so I might as well say I’m sorry I didn’t give Olive’s Ocean back to you, Mrs. Ryan. I loved it. I needed it. Thank you so much.

Next month’s book is Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett. Thanks for reading!