Island of the Blue Dolphins
Scott O'Dell, 1960
Young adult Travel & natureHistorical fictionHistory
Left alone on a remote island, a girl learns to hunt, build shelter and befriend the wild around her — a survival story drawn from a real castaway.
Feels like wonder, longing and curiosity. About nature, solitude and society.
A page from the book
What it costs to be the only one not counting the dead as profit.
Many of our tribe went to the cliff each night to count the number killed during the day. They counted the dead otter and thought of the beads and other things that each pelt meant. But I never went to the cove and whenever I saw the hunters with their long spears skimming over the water, I was angry, for these animals were my friends. Scott O'Dell.O'Dell based the novel on the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island, a Native American woman who lived alone there for eighteen years until her removal in 1853.
Books that feel like this
Where to get it
Some of these links earn us a small commission, at no cost to you. It keeps BookFeed free.
Questions readers ask
- What is Island of the Blue Dolphins like?
- Feels like wonder, longing and curiosity. About nature, solitude and society.
- What should I read after Island of the Blue Dolphins?
- If you liked Island of the Blue Dolphins, try Where the Crawdads Sing (Delia Owens), Life of Pi (Yann Martel) and The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel).
A taste of the feed
What if death is not life's enemy but its jealous lover?
The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity — it’s envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.
Life of Pi · Yann Martel
To be five years old and understand that nobody is coming.
The child was alone in a wilderness of grassy steppes and scattered forests. Glaciers spanned the continent on the north, pushing their cold before them. Untold numbers of grazing animals, and the carnivores that preyed on them, roamed the vast prairies, but people were few. She had nowhere to go and she had no one who would come and look for her. She was alone.
The Clan of the Cave Bear · Jean M. Auel
The wilderness grief leaves you in, and the years it takes to walk out.
It took me years to take my place among the ten thousand things again. To be the woman my mother raised. To remember how she said honey and picture her particular gaze. I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days to do it. I didn’t know where I was going until I got there.
Wild · Cheryl Strayed
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
Keep reading in the feed