Sharon Creech asserts that establishing a sense of place and depicting both its beauty and its impact upon character plays a significant role in her writing. In Walk Two Moons, Sal's very language, which is filled with humor and local color, helps to create that sense of place and to depict the impact of physical localities upon a person. Her descriptive words and phrases—"a caboodle of houses," "plucked me up like a weed," "ornery and stubborn as an old donkey," "a hog's belly full of things to say about her"—describe her and her past as much as they do her present surroundings, for they show her frame of reference. Her words reveal her as a deliberately quirky girl from the country, who rather precociously and swaggeringly embraces her peculiarities.

Besides her bravura with words, Sal possesses a keen eye: she is quick to debunk the words of grownups around her, expressing constant suspicion of her father's motives toward Margaret Cadaver, and secretly suspecting the real reason she is going on the trip with her grandparents is to keep them from getting in trouble. Sal, sharp-eyed and fast-talking, seems less like a teenage girl than like a cynical ranch hand, or a hard-bitten private eye. This characterization again displays the romance's bent for exaggeration and metaphor. Sal perhaps likes to appear tougher and more insouciant than she really is in her tall-tale retelling of her quest. Sal's voice also serves as a source of the humor Creech finds so integral to her writing.

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