At the end of the novel, Pearl’s reckless mother returns to reclaim her daughter, but it is an altered Pearl she finds. “She thought about how her whole life had been a big jumble of mixed-up craziness. And then she’d had this one taste of the normal side of life, of people treating each other good and deserving of love, and she hadn’t belonged. Had felt wrong and out of place. A fish out of water, flopping around trying to be normal, too. She knew she hadn’t been very good at normal living, but she thought maybe she could get the hang of it if she had another chance.” While the reader aches for Pearl’s return to a nomadic, emotionally unsatisfying life with her mother, she knows that Pearl wants more from her life; she wants that other chance.

For her luminous vision of human decency and for her unwillingness to compromise her too real and poignant ending, we award Barbara O’Connor the Massachusetts Book Award for Children’s Literature for Moonpie and Ivy.