My middle-grade adventures continue. This time I’m revisiting two books I’ve read before. The point of the exercise is to learn from the masters, to recognize what’s done well, and these books do so many things well.
In How to Speak Dolphin, Ginny Rorby creates a complex and emotionally honest story about Lily, the older sister of an autistic brother. Never sentimental, this book is deeply moving, presenting Lily’s dilemma of whether to help Nori, a young dolphin being held in captivity for human use, or ignore the animal’s suffering because relating to Nori is one of the few things that make her autistic brother happy.
Lily’s friend Zoe, who just happens to be blind, keeps pushing Lily. She has no doubt that keeping social animals like dolphins in captivity is cruel and never justified. I won’t provide any spoilers but will say the ending wasn’t easy or simple but felt true to the realities of the world we live in.
This was the second book of Ms. Rorby’s that I read. The first one was much more emotionally wrenching thanks to my own experiences with animals kept for medical research, and the kinds of research I was exposed to in my primatology courses.
That book, Hurt Go Happy, won Ms. Rorby the Schneider Family Book Award. Joey Willis is deaf and her mother won’t allow her to learn sign language. That changes when she meets the chimp Sukari, who signs, and Joey secretly begins to learn it too. When Sukari is moved from a relatively loving and safe situation to a prison-like facility where animals are “stored” for medical experimentation, Joey has to decide what to do. The book can be hard to read, but everything is based on fact and the story is immediately relatable for kids and adults alike. The human characters are placed in difficult situations and Rorby’s characters always have enough complexity for us to empathize with them as well as the animals that are trapped or endangered by humans.
Well-researched, powerfully written, and based in fact, I highly recommend both books to readers of all ages.
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