Reviews for Island of the Blue Dolphins

The average rating for Island of the Blue Dolphins based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-04-12 00:00:00 John Justice this may be the best book for kids ever written. it teaches young girls everything they will ever need to know in their resourceful lives: how to build a fence out of whale bones, how to kill giant squids, how to alternately befriend and defend against scary wild dogs, and how to make skirts from cormorant feathers. since i got kicked out of brownies and never got to learn All The Things That Girl Scouts Learn, this book taught me how to wilderness-survive. and now i live in queens. so - not much use for it, but still a book i have such a fondness for. and i have an old copy, too, where they used to make the page-ends colored. mine is green. i need to read this again. and find out why montambo doesnt like it... come to my blog!

Review # 2 was written on 2018-01-24 00:00:00 Dallas Pennington When my defiant preteen daughter stands before me in great protest to any one of my many actions or words, she often resembles Disney's Pocahontas. She has tan skin and black hair that touches her waist and dark eyes that are kept busy with a vigilant observance of the world's injustices (and her mother's shortcomings). If she's not on horseback, then she's standing before you, holding a cat or a small rodent or a dog. (Or a strange, stuffed chinchilla). So, when this middle child of mine received the Island of the Blue Dolphins for Christmas, I thought. . . how perfect. How perfect for her. She's just shy of 10, and so ready to think herself capable of being away from adults and alone on an island, stringing beads for necklaces and communing with wild dogs. And that's about all I remembered from this 6th grade read of mine: a girl, stranded alone on an island. Wild dogs. Abalone. (Whatever in the hell I thought that was in middle school. I'm quite sure I didn't look it up in a dictionary. Yes, we used to have things in classrooms called dictionaries). Okay, so, stranded island girl, wild dogs, abalone. . . yes, they were all there, waiting to greet me again at my return, but I had forgotten something better. . . this book's ability to provoke some thoughtful conversations. See, this story's not so strong on character development or dialogue (does anyone even speak??), but our island girl, Karana, is faced with many predicaments. Karana's story provides many opportunities to turn to an interested tween and ask with ease, “What would you do?” My daughter was absolutely riveted by the story, from beginning to end, and the most beautiful part for me, in this read-aloud was when the lonely Karana ends up being ushered home by a school of dolphins: a swarm of dolphins appeared. They came swimming out of the west, but as they saw the canoe they turned around in a great circle and began to follow me. They swam up slowly and so close that I could see their eyes, which are large and the color of the ocean. Then they swam on ahead of the canoe, crossing back and forth in front of it, diving in and out, as if they were weaving a piece of cloth with their broad snouts. Dolphins are animals of good omen. It made me happy to have them swimming around the canoe, and though my hands had begun to bleed from the chafing of the paddle, just watching them made me forget the pain. I was very lonely before they appeared, but now I felt that I had friends with me and did not feel the same. My daughter sat up after this passage, and, with tears in her eyes, announced, “Mommy! It was the ancestors! The ancestors sent those dolphins to Karana in her darkest moment, to bring her joy. And that's what animals, do, Mommy, they bring us joy.” And, by the story's end, Karana feels the same way, when she makes the decision to stop killing animals for their hides, feathers and teeth. The island girl realizes that the animals have been her sole companions on this long stretch of isolation and decides that “animals and birds are like people, too, though they do not talk the same or do the same things. Without them the earth would be an unhappy place.” It is a simple story, with very little action or dialogue, but a whole lot of deep thinks and feels for those tricky preteens.