Walk Two Moons

I started using heavily in the ninth grade (cliff notes that is) I have always had a difficult time getting into a book. However, I remember really enjoying the book Walk Two Moons when I was about ten years old. I remember very little about the book, in fact the only thing I remembered before looking it up for the book assignment was that someone was bitten by a cottonmouth water moccasin and they cut two slits in the persons leg and then someone else sucked the venom out. I decided to read up on the book and began to remember as I read a brief synopsis. The book is about a girl whose mother has died, and throughout the book she tells her story as well as her friends as she journeys across the country with her grandparents.
I don't know why I enjoyed this book as a kid. I remember really getting into it one night and staying up reading the book by night-light until the wee hours of the morning. I remember not being able to remember what the book was about just a few months later though. I think it's interesting that the only thing I really remembered was the grandma being bit by a cottonmouth water moccasin. I grew up in Idaho and never had heard of such a snake, but I assumed they were prevalent in the midwest. When my family moved to the midwest I went on a camping trip with the young men and we were out swimming when we saw one gliding along the lake. No one acted like it was a big deal. They obviously hadn't read Walk Two Moons.
I remember being intrigued that the grandpa sucked out the venom. When I learned later that the better treatment for such an injury was a tourniquet I wondered if the grandma would have lived if they used that method instead of trying to suck it out. Perhaps this was the first time in my life that I ever really connected with the characters of a story.
Overall, I don't think this book had a very long lasting impression on me. Except for the part about the snake. Which for whatever reason I have thought back on several times in the course of my life.