Literary Significance and Reception
The novel was highly acclaimed upon its publication, and became O'Dell's best known work. It was awarded the Newbery Medal in 1961. O'Dell published a sequel, Zia, in 1976. This book follows 14-year-old Zia, Karana's niece, who believes her aunt is still alive, and eventually brings about her rescue by George Nidever.
Read more about this topic: Island Of The Blue Dolphins
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or reception:
“In general I do not draw well with literary men—not that I dislike them but I never know what to say to them after I have praised their last publication.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)