Book Review #71 - The Music of Dolphins

I read this with Seth's third grade class. Last May.

I consider this Flowers for Algernon lite. The author attempts to teach a similar lesson, that people as experiments, don't always turn out the way we expect, but it doesn't really have the same aftertaste.

A girl survives a plane accident when she is around 4 (her mother and brother die), but is never discovered and spends the next decade living with an adoptive pod of dolphins until she is discovered, once again, but society. By this time, she is wild, or feral, and can't talk, can't read or write, and has no understanding of what's "normal" for human beings.

As much as they try to bring her back into the human fold, this girl wants to be a dolphin. She wants to swim with her family, and sing and move as she's always done. As her understanding of humans progresses, her desire to return to life with her dolphin family increases, until she eventually regresses and is allowed to rejoin her dolphin family.

Ya. O.K. then. I get the author is trying to write a story about what it means to be human, and how we can all be different, but...fourth graders don't understand girls who want to be dolphins.