We finished Island of the Blue Dolphins recently and I had to tell him the rest. Scott O'Dell kind of omits what happened to Karana's people 18 years before and to Karana herself: they all died of European diseases within weeks of reaching the mainland. Karana died, apparently of dysentery--can you imagine discovering fresh fruit for the first time?--in two weeks or months of removal. Around 1940, someone took a photograph of her decayed hut.
I scanned the shelves, wondering what next. King of the Wind, I decided, even though my edition's illustrations are in graytone instead of color. Sham's birth, with the shaft of sunlight, does not work in grays. But I don't mind the beating scene, which gave me nightmares, being toned down.
Can my memory be correct, of learning about vivid writing in third grade? Because I remember a textbook--one of the Lippincott readers that we used from first grade to fifth?--using the fight between Sham and Hobgoblin as an example of how to write a lively, descriptive action scene, and that I already knew it. What that memory, false or not, does mean is that I am reading RDC a book years younger than our normal fare. Reading Island for the first time in years I noticed that even its sentences are quite simple, but King is even simpler.
And I still have to get through the whipping scene.
But after that comes The Slave Dancer, which I don't currently own. When we read The Yearling a few years ago, Fodder-wing made me sadder than Flag. I expect that now the Middle Passage will make me sadder than that vicious man.