Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I finished reading Eunice Tietjens’ Boy of the South Seas last night, and I have to say–my strongest feeling about it is relief.

As in, I’m glad to be done.  What’s next?

It’s not that I hated it, you understand–it was fine.  It just wasn’t any better than fine.  Boy was a Newbery Honor book in 1932, back when stories of young people from faraway places made up a significant portion of the winners, and I’m guessing it won because it was the first book about a Polynesian boy to be published in the U.S.  (I’m guessing this, mind.  I haven’t researched, but I sincerely doubt there was an abundance of books about Polynesian young people in the 1930s.)  I googled the author and she was actually born in Chicago (Tietjens was a married name); apparently she traveled extensively in Asia, but that’s not exactly Polynesia, is it?  I’m generally pretty good at judging books in their historical context, but there were a few phrases that were still grating.  (“Teiki, who like all simple primitive people, was not afraid of silence…”)

As far as the plot, well–Teiki accidentally stows away on a schooner that carries him far from his island.  He ends up on Moorea, where he is eventually adopted by a loving woman and her family, and then finds a mentor and new life direction in an unexpected place.  A phrase at most is spent on his real father’s inevitable grief at his son’s disappearance, and after Teiki finds his mentor, his adoptive parents are almost entirely out of the picture; as a parent, I found this grating as well.  To be frank, Boy of the South Seas feels like a romanticized look at island life by a woman who did some basic research and leaned quite a bit toward the ‘noble savage’ ideal (even if ‘savage’ isn’t quite the right term in this case).  Unless you have a fascination with historical portrayals of the Pacific Islands and their inhabitants–OR a Newbery-related goal–I’d probably skip this one.