--Scott O'Dell, "Newberry Award Acceptance" Speech, Horn Book, August, 1961

Scott O'Dell, an award winning author of more than twenty books, was a naturalist who drew on his own experiences as a boy growing up in a rural environment to write historical fiction for children. Born to railway employee Bennett Mason O'Dell on Terminal Island, May 23, 1898, O'Dell spent his youth roaming the primitive coastal communities of Southern California where his father was stationed. His stories are a collection of detailed information of local geography, plant and wildlife gleaned from a childhood spent in close association with nature:

Wherever we went, it was into frontier country, like Los Angeles. There was San Pedro which is a part of Los Angeles. And Rattlesnake Island (Terminal Island), across the bay from San Pedro, where we lived in a house on stilts and the waves came up and washed under us every day and ships went by...(Commire 112)

O'Dell spent his days exploring waterways and tide-pools from San Pedro, north to Santa Barbara and his much beloved Channel Islands. His youthful adventures included appropriating Ore

In addition to chronically his own knowledge and experience with the island's various plant and animal life, O'Dell includes a description of an exciting and all too common California event: an earthquake. Devoting several pages of Karana's narrative to it, O'Dell details the earthquake from beginning to end. Beginning with the heavy stillness and drop in tide level that often accompanies a coastal earthquake, the narrative carries the reader through the sounds of thunder from the ground, the feel of sand moving underfoot and the heroine's subsequent terror that culminates in her running from a series of tidal waves roaring toward the island (O'Dell 166-168).

Southern California experienced twenty-two earthquakes between the year of O'Dell's birth and the publication of his first children's novel (SCECD). He was in residence for twenty-one of the twenty-two years. One in particular, the Long Beach Earthquake of 1933 occurred on his doorstep and three others occurred within the decade prior to the book's publication, possibly during the story's inception (SCECD). Since San Nicholas Island is located only sixty miles west of Los Angeles, the author' decision to include an earthquake, and to provide intimate details of the sights and sounds of the experience are as equally accurate as his other details concerning local ecology. It is not surprising then, that Karana's vivid details of an earthquake in Island of the Blue Dolphin are so strikingly realistic.

The description of the "island" where Karana is stranded, physically mirrors that of San Nicholas, one of the Channel Isles. San Nicholas is shaped like a fish, complete with a tail. In Karana's narrative, her native "Island of the Blue Dolphin" is also described as a fish with, "its nose pointing to the sunset, and its fins making reefs and the rock ledges along the shore (O'Dell 9)." She also chronicles the seasons for the coastal island accurately and offers details throughout the book of local plant life. She describes Yucca blooming in the hills, the different colors of sand flowers in the spring on coastal dunes, lupine growing close to running springs and bright red comul bushes growing from the cliffs (O'Dell 112)." All of these plant forms are indigenous to the Southern California coast and its islands.

gon logs from large rafts in the San Pedro Harbor. He and his fellow adventurers would paddle out past the breakwater to the cliffs of Point Firman and

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Approximate Word count = 1767
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)