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Summary
Summary
For fans of Hatchet and Island of the Blue Dolphins comes Theodore Taylor's classic bestseller and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award winner, The Cay .
Phillip is excited when the Germans invade the small island of Cura ao. War has always been a game to him, and he's eager to glimpse it firsthand-until the freighter he and his mother are traveling to the United States on is torpedoed.
When Phillip comes to, he is on a small raft in the middle of the sea. Besides Stew Cat, his only companion is an old West Indian, Timothy. Phillip remembers his mother's warning about black people: "They are different, and they live differently."
But by the time the castaways arrive on a small island, Phillip's head injury has made him blind and dependent on Timothy.
"Mr. Taylor has provided an exciting story...The idea that all humanity would benefit from this special form of color blindness permeates the whole book...The result is a story with a high ethical purpose but no sermon."-- New York Times Book Review
"A taut tightly compressed story of endurance and revelation...At once barbed and tender, tense and fragile--as Timothy would say, 'outrageous good.'"-- Kirkus Reviews
* "Fully realized setting...artful, unobtrusive use of dialect...the representation of a hauntingly deep love, the poignancy of which is rarely achieved in children's literature."-- School Library Journal , Starred
"Starkly dramatic, believable and compelling."-- Saturday Review
"A tense and moving experience in reading."-- Publishers Weekly
"Eloquently underscores the intrinsic brotherhood of man."-- Booklist
"This is one of the best survival stories since Robinson Crusoe ."-- The Washington Star
- A New York Times Best Book of the Year
- A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year
- A Horn Book Honor Book
- An American Library Association Notable Book
- A Publishers Weekly Children's Book to Remember
- A Child Study Association's Pick of Children's Books of the Year
- Jane Addams Book Award
- Lewis Carroll Shelf Award
- Commonwealth Club of California: Literature Award
- Southern California Council on Literature for Children and Young People Award
- Woodward School Annual Book Award
- Friends of the Library Award, University of California at Irvine
Author Notes
Author Theodore Taylor was born in Statesville, North Carolina on June 23, 1921. At the age of seventeen, he became a copyboy at the Washington, D. C. Daily News and was writing radio network sports for NBC in New York two years later. During World War II, he joined the merchant marines and earned a commission as an ensign in the U. S. Navy. He was recalled to active duty during the Korean War. In 1955, he became a press agent for Paramount Pictures and later became a story editor and an associate producer.
He has written over fifty fiction and non-fiction books for young adults and adults. He has received numerous awards for his works including the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for The Cay, the 1992 Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Young Adult Mystery for The Weirdo, and the 1996 Scott O'Dell Award for historical fiction for The Bomb. He died on October 26, 2006.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-8-This is a classic novel about racism and a young man's realization that skin color does not matter. Phillip is an 11-year-old living in the West Indies at the start of World War II. He's excited at the idea of being in the war but is taken away by his mother who only wants to return to the safety of Virginia. Their ship is sunk by the Germans, and Phillip and his mother end up on separate life rafts. After being hit on the head with a beam from the sinking ship, Phillip awakens to find himself alone with Timothy, an old black ship hand, and Stew Cat, the ship's tomcat. The three survive on a raft for several days, during which time Phillip loses his eyesight due to the head injury. They eventually come ashore on a small unpopulated island. Phillip must learn to deal with his blindness and overcome his dislike for Timothy. Phillip's question, "Timothy, are you still black?," shows that Phillip has moved past the barrier of color. After Timothy's death, Phillip continues to live on the island and is eventually rescued and reunited with his parents. This audio version of Theodore Taylor's novel (Doubleday, 1987) is well done, with actor Michael Boatman doing a wonderful job of giving the characters individual voices. The West Indian dialect is smooth. At the end of the novel, there's an author Q&A featuring an interview with Taylor in which he talks about the inspirations for his characters and his travels. An excellent purchase for middle and high school libraries.-Lisa D. Williams, Chocowinity Middle School, NC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One LIKE SILENT, HUNGRY SHARKS that swim in the darkness of the sea, the German submarines arrived in the middle of the night. I was asleep on the second floor of our narrow, gabled green house in Willemstad, on the island of Curaçao, the largest of the Dutch islands just off the coast of Venezuela. I remember that on that moonless night in February 1942, they attacked the big Lago oil refinery on Aruba, the sister island west of us. Then they blew up six of our small lake tankers, the tubby ones that still bring crude oil from Lake Maracaibo to the refinery, Curaçaosche Petroleum Maatschappij, to be made into gasoline, kerosene, and diesel oil. One German sub was even sighted off Willemstad at dawn. So when I woke up there was much excitement in the city, which looks like a part of old Holland, except that all the houses are painted in soft colors, pinks and greens and blues, and there are no dikes. It was very hard to finish my breakfast because I wanted to go to Punda, the business district, the oldest part of town, and then to Fort Amsterdam where I could look out to sea. If there was an enemy U-boat out there, I wanted to see it and join the people in shaking a fist at it. I was not frightened, just terribly excited. War was something I'd heard a lot about, but had never seen. The whole world was at war, and now it had come to us in the warm, blue Caribbean. The first thing that my mother said was, "Phillip, the enemy has finally attacked the island, and there will be no school today. But you must stay near home. Do you understand?" I nodded, but I couldn't imagine that a shell from an enemy submarine would pick me out from all the buildings, or hit me if I was standing on the famous pontoon bridge or among the ships way back in the Schottegat or along St. Anna Bay. So later in the morning, when she was busy making sure that all our blackout curtains were in place, and filling extra pots with fresh water, and checking our food supply, I stole away down to the old fort with Henrik van Boven, my Dutch friend who was also eleven. I had played there many times with Henrik and other boys when we were a few years younger, imagining we were defending Willemstad against pirates or even the British. They once stormed the island, I knew, long ago. Or sometimes we'd pre tend we were the Dutch going out on raids against Spanish galleons. That had happened too. It was all so real that sometimes we could see the tall masted ships coming over the horizon. Of course, they were only the tattered-sailed native schooners from Venezuela, Aruba, or Bonaire coming in with bananas, oranges, papayas, melons, and vegetables. But to us, they were always pirates, and we'd shout to the noisy black men aboard them. They'd laugh back and go, "Pow, pow, pow!" The fort looks as though it came out of a story book, with gun ports along the high wall that faces the sea. For years, it guarded Willemstad. But this one morning, it did not look like a storybook fort at all. There were real soldiers with rifles and we saw machine guns. Men with binoculars had them trained toward the whitecaps, and everyone was tense. They chased us away, telling us to go home. Instead, we went down to the Koningin Emma Brug, the famous Queen Emma pontoon bridge, which spans the channel that leads to the huge harbor, the Schottegat. The bridge is built on floats so that it can swing open as ships pass in or out, and it connects Punda with Otrabanda, which means "other side," the other part of the city. The view from there wasn't as good as from the fort, but curious people were there, too, just looking. Strangely, no ships were moving in the channel The veerboots , the ferry boats that shuttled cars and people back and forth when the bridge was swung open, were tied up and empty. Even the native schooners were quiet against the docks inside the channel. And the black men were not laughing and shouting the way they usually did. Henrik said, "My father told me there is nothing left of Aruba. They hit Sint Nicolaas, you know." "Every lake tanker was sunk," I said. I didn't know if that were true or not, but Henrik had an irritating way of sounding official since his father was connected with the government. His face was round and he was chubby. His hair was straw-colored and his cheeks were always red. Henrik was very serious about everything he said or did. He looked toward Fort Amsterdam. He said, "I bet they put big guns up there now." That was a safe bet. And I said, "It won't be long until the Navy is here." Henrik looked at me. "Our Navy?" He meant the Netherlands Navy. "No," I said. "Ours." Meaning 'the American Navy, of course. His little Navy was scattered all over after the Germans took Holland. Henrik said quietly, "Our Navy will come too," and I didn't want to argue with him. Everyone felt bad that Holland had been conquered by the Nazis. Excerpted from The Cay by Theodore Taylor All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.