Despite my recent conversation that I have enjoyed a lot of the YA literature I have been reading with Steph in my comments, I have to admit Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell was okay at best. Winner of a Newbury Award, it has everything you’d expect from an award-winning children’s book: solid writing, a decent story, and a moderately developed protagonist. I think the main problem is that I am just not a big fan of island stories.
In the pacific ocean an island sits that looks like a big fish. Around it swim dolphins and other marine life. The native Indians fish the seas for food and want for nothing on their little island, until the Russians arrive with their big ships and request to hunt sea otter.
Karana’s father, the chief, allows the Russians to hunt Otter as long as they give half of their catches as payment to the tribe. The Russians reluctantly agree, but when time comes to pay fighting breaks out and the Russians flee the island on their ship. Half the tribe is wiped out, including Karana’s father.
The tribe decides to leave the island, but Karana and her brother get left behind. Soon her brother is killed by a ravage pack of dogs that roam around the island. Karana struggles to survive alone on an island where packs of wild dogs, hunger, intense loneliness, and even Tsunamis threaten to bring her to the brink of despiar. All the while she must also worry that any day the Russians who killed her father and destroyed her way of life may return.
This story is based on a true story. O’Dell wrote a fictionalized account from a diary. I suppose this is a great work to give to little girls; it is one of those rare works showing a woman surviving by herself without the help of a man, hunting and forging for food, and using her wits. Indeed, the character is hesitant at first to break her tribe’s taboo about woman not being allowed to hunt. The message here is pretty obvious: women can survive on their own without men, and you shouldn’t be afraid to challenge taboos or cultural gender norms.
The characters in those book also have given names and secret names like in the LeGuin fantasy book, A Wizard of Earthsea, that just a reviewed right before this entry. So perhaps this is a practice of Native American tribes, and LeGuin borrowed it. Overall, I enjoyed the story, but didn’t love it. It is hard to keep a conflict roaring with just one character roaming around an island.
“It is hard to keep a conflict roaring with just one character roaming around an island. ”
It worked for Robinson Crusoe and it’s modern YA equivalent Hatchet.