Dell Yearling has so many of the best kid’s books: this one, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Journey from Peppermint Street, Piping Down the Valleys Wild – I couldn’t name them all if I tried. This was one that, for awhile anyway, was on school reading lists (as so many Dell Yearlings were). Now, with school reading lists being what they are, who knows…

This book tells the story of a girl whose community lives on an island off the California coast. For as long as they can remember, they’ve lived there, surviving independently. One day, a ship arrives carrying a Russian and his crew of Aleut fisherman and hunters. This violently catapults the tribe into changes and, eventually, the entire community migrates to another island but Karana is inadvertently left behind.

She has no one to rely upon but herself: finding food, water, shelter, protecting herself against the wild dogs. I loved learning how she put together her knowledge to survive: sometimes you don’t realize how much you know until you have to do it alone. How she makes her own way, builds her own world, is inspiring. But she is lonely: she misses her family and her community.

The whole time, her greatest fear is that the Aleuts will return to cause more trouble – and then they do…

This book is based on a true story, about a girl who remained behind when her village left on ships. She survived alone on the island for 18 years before being discovered by another ship and brought to a mission in California, where she could only speak in sign language, her community’s language having been lost along with the rest of her people.

What I enjoy about this book is watching her figure out how to do things on her own. She’s old enough, when the book begins, to have learned how to do certain things: fish, weave, find water. But then she also tames a wild dog and builds a shelter with a protective fence; she builds her own dugout canoe – things she never had to do herself when her family and friends were around.

The story is told from her perspective, so you don’t feel the passing of time. Based on her history, she’s probably in her mid-20s or early 30s when she’s rescued. But you don’t realize this because you’re inside her frame of reference and time passes differently in there: she still feels like the girl she was at the start of the book, just more confidence in her self-sufficiency. And lonelier. In one of Edmund Crispin’s books, Gervase Fen gazes in a mirror and describes his own reflection; then breaks the fourth wall to reflect on how, someday, writers will find a different method for describing the main character than having him look in a mirror and describes what he sees.* Being alone on an island without mirrors makes this difficult for the main character here to describe the passage of time.

But isn’t it true for all of us? We live so inside our frame of reference that we don’t realize that we’ve gotten older or put on weight or boiled the frog in some other way, until we look in a mirror. Several years ago, I lost 50 pounds over the course of a year. My body felt leaner and stronger afterwards; clothes fit better. But I didn’t feel any different: I was still me. And, when I put the weight back on during a year of horrible work bullying, I could tell I had regained the weight: my clothes didn’t fit and, when I looked at myself next to other people, I could see that I was heavier. But I didn’t feel any different: I was still me. Age is the same way: I know I am getting older because the youngsta’s sometimes don’t get my cultural references (or, worse yet, think they’re quaint), but inside, I am still the me I was at 12 or 16 or 30.

I was listening to a podcast with Herminia Ibarra earlier this week, where she was saying that people who are struggling to change often say that new behaviors don’t feel like them; they doesn’t feel normal. But, she points out, when you are learning something new, the new things you’re learning won’t feel normal until you’ve practiced them: it’s not so much “fake it until you make it” but “practice trying it on until it feels normal.”**

Anyway, I love a good book about a strong woman who can stand on her own feet, take a situation where she has no idea what to do, make a plan and successfully execute on it. Whether she’s stranded alone on an island, trying to figure out how to use wally-stones to save the world, or stuck on a planet that appears to be a zoo for dinosaurs.

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^{*Crispin, being Crispin, puts this better than I just did in far fewer words; but I am too lazy to sneak into the bedroom in the dark (husband is sleeping) and find the exact book where he says it so I can quote the exact words here. I guess you’ll just have to read the entire Gervase Fen cannon to find the quote. Oops. Sorry.}

^{**I remember, at one point, my boss introduced me to a new executive who asked what I did at the company. I replied, flippantly, that my boss was strategy and I was execution. My boss looked at me with a fleetingly puzzled expression and said dismissively, “Oh, you’re strategic.” I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about until I read more about strategy then I realized that, yes, he was right: I was strategic. It was just that I had developed my strategic perspective over time and hadn’t even realized it. If you asked me if I was strategic, I would have said No, I just thought about the big picture and figured out what we needed to do to get there, communicated it in a way that got people on board, and helped people figure out how to execute on it and measure whether they had. But strategic, no, not me.}