This is the story of native girl who survives alone on an island off the coast of California for 18 years. All the people in her village left on the white man's boat with hopes for a better future, but Karana is left behind. She makes a home for herself, tools and weapons, maintaining a water supply, hunting for her food and gathering plants to use as medicine. She's a veritable badass survivor. For many years, she thinks someone will come back for her, and the book is filled with this aching, heart-wrenching longing for rescue. This is a gripping portrait of isolation and desolation, a marginal life hewn from the harsh world. Karana reflects at one point, ...the sound of a human voice. There is no sound like this in all the world. When I first learned this book was based on a true story, it changed the shape of my heart forever.

I read this book probably one hundred times when I was a kid. It's probably one of the most definitive texts of my childhood. It's a Newbury award winner. There's a movie, which I haven't seen, and a sequel, which I haven't read but probably will. Last night, I found myself in an all-too-familiar state of insomnia, in need of a familiar text. Goddess bless the Olympia Public Library's e-book lending service and their round-the-clock Overdrive service. I finished Island of the Blue Dolphins less than 12 hours later.

I greatly enjoyed revisiting the island, although my adult eyes noticed some holes in the story (the otter cape that wears out & reappears, for example) and shortcomings in the writing style that I missed in my previous readings. I must have cultivated some intense survivalist fantasies as a child to appreciate Karana's hardships and experiences so deeply. I will forever carry the memory of Karana sleeping atop a giant flat rock with the wild dogs circling all night, howling, while the wind whips over her in a dried seaweed bed. Her little house -- which she built herself, of course, from whale bones, kelp, driftwood and seal sinew, like any teenaged girl would do -- with its impermeable bone fence and the little yard full of tamed wild birds and creatures. She befriended a fox, for goodness sake, found him too needy, and set him free.

This book is strange and special and sticks in my mind.