Christmas gift ( )

Follows a lost dollhouse and its inhabitants to a 'floating island.'
About as enjoyable as Hitty and her interminably long hundred year reign. Yeesh. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed The Floating Island though I do have to count it as one of the strangest books I have ever read. It's basically a retelling of Swiss Family Robinson but from the point of view of a ship wrecked doll house family. Anne Parrish included also did the illustrations for the book (though she credits most of them to Mr. Doll). My son is enthralled with these illustrations, especially the one of the owl. I'm thinking of scanning the owl illustration and printing it out for his wall. ( )

Chosen as one of eight Newbery Honor books in 1931 - the second of Anne Parrish's titles to be so distinguished, following upon The Dream Coach, a Newbery Honor book in 1925 - Floating Island is the story of a family of dolls who are shipwrecked on a deserted island. Purchased, together with their house, the Doll family - Mr. and Mrs. Doll, William and Annabel Doll, Baby Doll, Dinah the Cook, and Finny, Lobby, Chicky and Pudding (the four seemingly sentient side-dishes provided in the Dolls' home) - are meant as a gift for a young girl named Elizabeth, and are shipped to her home in the tropics, only to see themselves stranded on a tropical paradise when the ship on which they are traveling goes down. Profusely illustrated (ostensibly by Mr. Doll), with amusing little captions, and replete with authorial footnotes giving informational asides not immediately pertinent to the Dolls' adventures, the book follows the various members of the family as they struggle to cope with their new environment, and to find one another. The majority of the tale, in fact, is devoted to their search for one another, through the jungles and across the beaches of Floating Island.

Like The Dream Coach, I found myself distinctly underwhelmed by this selection, and at a little bit of a loss to see those qualities in it that merited a nod from the Newbery committee. The tone was just a little too cutesy for me, with that kind of self-conscious wonderment that some earlier authors of children's fare seemed to feel was obligatory, and while the premise was interesting - sentient dolls! being lost on a tropical island! - the story never seemed to go anywhere, and certainly wasn't enough to distract me from my discomfort at certain socially anachronistic passages. To wit: the racist portrayal of Dinah, and her relationship with the rest of the Dolls, which I felt was made all the creepier by the fact that these were dolls. I was grateful that Parrish didn't have Dinah speaking in the stereotypically broken English usually reserved for black characters in vintage children's fiction, but dismayed at the fact that she apparently longs to be white (she wears Mrs. Doll's wig for a time, confessing sadly to Mr. Doll, after the fact, that it only made her feel "blacker," revealing that the point of wearing it was to feel less black), and has some kind of innate connection to the monkeys, and to island life. The assumption that Dinah would feel more at home on a south seas island, because she is black, implies an entire world view that is problematic: all non-European peoples are essentially the same (so what if Dinah's ancestors came from Africa, NOT from this island? It's all the same thing, isn't it?); all non-European people are closer to "nature" (Dinah's instinctive "memory" of how to do things, on the island), and therefore a little less civilized, a little more likely to slide back into barbarity (Dinah's desire to say on the island).

To be clear, Parrish does not suggest these things, but they certainly came to mind, when reading some of her passages, and made me uncomfortable enough that I could not enjoy the other aspects of the story, or the (admittedly) charming artwork. As a consequence, I wouldn't recommend this to contemporary young readers (the original target audience), although I think that older readers with an interest in doll fiction, or Newbery completists like myself, will find much here to interest them. ( )