Spoilers follow below! 
These two books follow Raymie Nightingale and round out the trilogy with the girls at 14. Louisiana’s Way Home details Louisiana’s struggle to understand her past and to cope with her grandmother’s decisions, as she uproots them yet again and forces Louisiana to leave behind the new home and friends she’s made. They end up in a small town in Georgia and she has to find her footing once again in the face of a lot of revelations and emotional upheaval. This is probably my favorite book of the trilogy although I think they’re all extremely strong and it’s hard to pit them against each other. I find Louisiana a very sympathetic point of view character and her arc to be especially engaging. DiCamillo continues to highlight that there are both good and bad people in the world, with some very saintly characters here and some real jerks, but she also is great at portraying complicated and flawed people who do both good and bad things. Louisiana’s Granny is not a saint and does a lot of things in this book that hurt Louisiana and cause her pain, but she also has been doing her best to protect her and give her skills to survive.
Beverly, Right Here is the final book in the trilogy and as it opens, Beverly leaves home after her dog Buddy dies. Her relationship with her mother has always been highly fraught back to the first book in the series. Her mother drinks and Beverly has never felt loved by her. She ends up living in a trailer park, where an old woman named Iola takes her in as long as Beverly agrees to drive her around, since Iola’s son doesn’t want her driving anymore. Beverly is 14 and has no driver’s license, but she knows how and is lying about her age. She gets a job working at a fried fish restaurant and being paid under the table, and develops a crush on a cashier at the local store. There’s a sense of being suspended in a dream a bit here and of coping with grief and anger over the difficulties and indignities of life. Out of the three books, this is the saddest and most adult, although it does continue the themes of people who will help you and the power of human connection, as well as those real jerks in life who will misunderstand and destroy things. The joy and strength that can be gained from transitory, shining moments, poetry, and art, and how that can sustain you even in the face of abuse, neglect, and grief, is so well portrayed here in such a nuanced and thoughtful way.
These books are well worth reading for all ages and are the sort of books that you get something new out of as you revisit them. I appreciate the nuances and interconnectedness that DiCamillo brings into her writing and her ability to get at very subtle emotional moments. Just great reading!
