The Music of the Dolpins is a story about an infant who was raised to adolescence by dolphins and then captured by humans who kept her as an object of research until she finally won her return to the ocean.

This book is wonderfully suited to working with a group with a wide range of reading skills. The decoding is simple, but the ideas are complex and engaging for readers of all levels. In my class, students chose to read it out loud, a page each turn. Most of the students were very enthusiastic about it, and everyone opted to continue to the end of the book. One student who read the book on her own said that the story was “heart touching” with so many “descriptive words that it made [her] heart shrink with sympathy.”

Reviewers agree that the book lends itself to thought-provoking discussions on a number of issues: how scientists view uniqueness in society; what represents home; the power of adults over children; the power of government over individuals; and the relationship between humans and animals, etc. This book lends itself to discussion and writing.

The author has used different sizes of print (ranging from 50 to 165 words per page) and different levels of sentence complexity to represent different stages in the life of the main character. Students became able to use the print size and fonts to complement the story line in the text. One instructor thought that the plot would be simple for students to understand. However, my students found the story line quite challenging because of the use of flashbacks. The scenes in the present were not always clear until after the flashbacks provided more context.

The book has no illustrations, but the print size and font variations helped to make it visually interesting.

We recommend The Music of the Dolphins for individual and classroom use.