Boy of the South Seas

After a somewhat reluctant start, my dad now seems fully committed to helping me achieve my Newbery goal. Completely self-motivated, he consulted my list of remaining Newberys, double-checked with me, and then checked three out from his university library and brought them all the way to Georgia when he came to visit last weekend! Really, he's come a long way. 

Boy of the South Seas was not as bad as some other 30's Newberys. It helped that it was an easy less-than-200-page read. It was really sad, though. The main character is a boy who lives on a sparsely-inhabited island in the South Pacific (100 years ago) and in the first chapter, a merchant ship arrives on the island, he climbs aboard to explore, falls asleep, and wakes up after the boat has set sail and they won't return him to his home. The first chapter ends with the author commenting about how the boy would not lay eyes on his own island again until he was an adult! Tragic!

He jumps ship a little while later and gets adopted by a nice woman at the new island that he swims to, so the story mellows considerably. And it sort of resolves nicely in the end with opportunities for Teiki to share his culture and language with the world so they're not lost forever.