The Cay

Whoops... put this on the wrong blog at first.

This is a book I had to read in... elementary school, I think?  I seem to remember Mr. Nofziger making us read this.  Well, I had to read it in school, anyway, which is why it was in that pile of "should we keep it or not?" books that Mom and Dad brought out here.  Anyway, I read it again becuase all I could remember was something about a cay...

So, we've got a kid who gets shipwrecked on an island with an old man.  Luckily for the kid, he gets a knock on the head in the shipwreck that blinds him, so he's completely dependent on the old man.  Really, I think the moment he wakes up in a lifeboat with only the old guy we all know that this will only be a real book if it includes the death of the old guy, so... we wait.  We know it's coming.  (And if we don't, we've never read a single book or seen a single movie in our entire lives, because the kid even says, "I wonder if Timothy was preparing me for his eventual death...")  Usual shipwreck/deserted island fare... rain catchers, what will we eat, oh, there's a hurricane, yada yada yada.  Kid has fears, kid overcomes fears, kid grows so much, what a marvelous young man he turns into.  This would have probably been a really cool book for a kid to read before Survivor was on TV.  But as it is, readers are just wishing for some cool story about an emergency tracheotomy with a coconut shell or something like that.  It's an average story, but I think the author was really trying to give us some message with the whole "rich white kid, old black man" thing.  Which was also lost on us because by this time we've all seen enough sensitive movies to not be phased by how prejudiced people used to be.  Oh, those poor uneducated people, aren't we all just the same underneath our skin?  

I will say, however, if it had been written today, the author probably would have been sued by the ACLU for writing the old guy's accent phonetically.  

So, that's about all I got.  Decent book, nothing wrong with it, but I don't love it and won't read it over and over... it's not going on the shelf.  But don't let your kids complain when they have to read it in school, there's a lot worse junk out there that they'll have to read.  (I'm sure some of those will end up in this blog eventually...)