Spoiler-free summary: A family of dolls and their dollhouse is purchased by a man who packs them up and sends them by ship to his niece. However, the ship wrecks in a storm, and the dolls and the dollhouse are washed onto an island and are separated from each other. The family goes through charming trials to reunite, including dealing with some friendly and unfriendly animals. A well done adventure story on par with The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle.
Discussion: I mentioned in my introduction post that I’m buying a copy of each book as I get to it, and I’ve stuck with that so far, even if a good amount of my actual reading has been on Libby or with public domain PDFs of the older ones. I’m hitting the point I worried about – I haven’t had an issue yet with finding books, but there’s a short stretch here of some out-of-print, not-at-all-popular-anymore books that has made me think harder about the purchasing policy. I don’t have a problem dropping two or three bucks for each one, but am I willing to do $20? $40? I guess we’ll see how common it is.
Anyway, getting a couple chapters into this book, and I couldn’t help but think of the winner from the year before this one, Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, which is also about a doll that goes on an adventure, some of which was on remote island, even. I’ve written about this before, but the adventure book as is found in the early decades of the Newbery just doesn’t seem to exist anymore. In the case of Hitty, that’s good, it’s one of the winners that has aged the poorest – the island she goes to has a native tribe who end up revering Hitty as a god. 1923’s The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle has its own problems, but is more kind-hearted about its remote island with warring native groups (a floating island, no less).
So I was prepared to cringe my way through this one like I did with Hitty, and then… I didn’t! There are no humans in the main story, just the dolls and some intelligent animals, and the depiction of the cook doll is the only thing that is a little dicey (okay, I just saw the cover art and remembered the scene where he pretends to be an Indian, not great). Otherwise, this is a charming breeze of a story, and again, represents a type of story I haven’t seen from recent winners or the Newbery mocks I’ve done, the “protagonist gets transported to the middle of nowhere and has to adapt to roughing it.” Disney had movies like this in the ’50s, like Swiss Family Robinson or, less exactly, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or Treasure Island. 2023 winner Freewater might scratch that itch a little, although the characters bounce back and forth between their old life. Or do those books exist, and they just don’t get Newbery buzz so I don’t see them? I don’t know.
Really curious about this next one, Leader By Destiny: George Washington, Man and Patriot by Jeanette Eaton. I’m going to bet it’s really boring, but I hope I’m wrong.
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