Music Of Dolphins By Karen Hesse

Miss Oppelt's Reading Adventures: The Music of Dolphins by Karen Hesse

The Music of Dolphins is a story about what it takes to be human.  Most of us never think about how we learned to be human.  In our minds, it just happened.  We were born, we grew up, and we just knew how to be human.  But it doesn't really work like that.  We have parents who teach us how to walk, talk, and behave.  We learn from the example of the people around us, even the bad ones.  But human behavior is something that is learned, it just doesn't feel like learning while we are growing up with it. The story is told in the first person, and I love the way that Karen Hesse uses visual cues to show the readers how Mila develops.  In the beginning of the book, the words are very large, like she's just learning to write (remember how big the letters were that you made in kindergarten?).  As the story goes on, it becomes clear that Mila has begun to master the language of the humans, and is able to understand the human world around her. As she becomes more engaged in the human experience, she finds herself longing for her dolphin family.  She doesn't understand certain things that are exclusively human:  anger, jealousy, territory, sadness.  Until she came to live with the doctors that are taking care of her, she had no understanding of any of that.  As she begins to absorb more human behaviors, the more she is unable to deny the call of her real home.

The music of dolphins

The music of dolphins

The music of dolphins

The new dramathemes

Out of the dust