["Child of Fire"] brims with violence as well as cruelty, usually involving animals. It also focuses so narrowly on a few minor and unfortunate aspects of Chicano culture that it would be an exceptionally poor introduction for young readers to that large, vivid ethnic group. The narrator is Delaney, an Anglo (white non-Chicano) juvenile parole officer in San Diego…. Strangely, all of Delaney's charges have Spanish surnames.

Scott O'Dell is a much-honored author, a real general of children's literature who comes with as many medals as a prizewinning Swiss chocolate. Therefore he must be judged by the highest standards as one's expectations are keenly aroused. Alas, they are not fulfilled [with The Captive]. We all understand what is meant by a good bad book. It is a book that is thoroughly reprehensible and lacking in all the higher qualities of literature, such as moral values, philosophy, construction, ch...

Since good story ideas do not come along like streetcars even to master storytellers, it is a happy day when a compelling writer like Scott O'Dell meets a compelling subject like William Tyndale, the sixteenth-century martyr who first translated the Bible into English. An unlikely subject, one may think, for the author of "Island of the Blue Dolphins," "The King's Fifth," and other books set on the Pacific Coast. Yet Mr. O'Dell [in "The Hawk That Dare ...

"Kathleen, Please Come Home" is a sympathetic portrait of a 15-year-old from a happy middle-class home who runs away. Mr. O'Dell … can weave a suspenseful tale, and he has done so in his latest novel, which is in large part a young woman's diary. Romantic and impressionable, Kathleen Winters falls in love with a 17-year-old Mexican illegal alien who, at first sight, reminded her of Don Quixote. Caught with fake identification papers, Ramón is deported. When he tries...

[The Amethyst Ring] concludes O'Dell's dazzling drama of the temptation, fall, and redemption of Julian Escobar, the 16th-century Spanish seminarian who came in The Captive to rule a New World island as the Mayan god Kukulcan. Having witnessed the fall of Moctezuma in The Feathered Serpent, Julian returns to prepare the defense of his own island against the inevitable coming of Cortes. But Julian's dwarf companion deserts him with their ship filled with Aztec gold; the island falls to C...

Plot and character are deftly interlinked in the story [The Dark Canoe] told by Nathan Clegg, sixteen, who had sailed with his brothers Jeremy and Caleb from Nantucket to find a sunken ship, the Amy Foster, at Magdalena Bay in Baja California. Jeremy, Nathan's idol, has mysteriously disappeared while Caleb, after the discovery of the underwater location of the Amy Foster, has, in a diver's outfit, been probing the wreck…. The skill of the author is revealed in his masterly treatment of ...

The one thing a novel about the Aztec is bound to have is exotica. What with tombs lined with gold, hearts torn palpitating from sacrificial victims, feather banners, temples and palaces, it is hard to imagine an Aztec book that is dull. And Scott O'Dell's ["The Feathered Serpent"] is not dull. It is the second volume in a series concerning the adventures of young Spanish seminarian Julián Escobar…. In ["The Feathered Serpent"] he is coerced by the gre...

Writers may choose their subjects, but good writers have less to say about their themes, which are apt to rise, bidden or unbidden, from the raw material of their deepest preoccupations. Never does Scott O'Dell play better music than when he introduces what seems to be his favorite motif: the pull between the individual's need for solitude and the need for society…. After losing her father at the hands of the rebels and her brother at the hands of the King's men, Sarah Bishop, in...

In The Feathered Serpent, Scott O'Dell … gives us the second installment of his chronicle set in old Mexico and dealing with the adventures of Julian Escobar, a young Spanish seminarian. In the sequence's first book, The Captive, Julian, after being cast away among the Maya, by chance assumed the role of their god, Kukulcan. The Feathered Serpent tells us of Julian's subsequent attempts to restore a Mayan city to its former splendor and gives us his eyewitness account of Hern�...

[The Battle of San Pascal] is the climax of [Carlota,] an economically told story which, in its delineation of a strong-minded, independent heroine, recalls the author's memorable Island of the Blue Dolphins. The spare, well-honed style is artistically suited to the first person narrative. Carlota de Zubarán—a fictional counterpart of Luisa de Montero who lived in Southern California during the early nineteenth century—indicates the changing political and social climate which cau...

O'Dell's [The Hawk That Dare Not Hunt by Day] is a fairly interesting, occasionally exciting historical novel that centers on the intrigue involved in the printing and distribution of the first English translation of the New Testament. The narrator is a 16-year-old English orphan, Tom Barton, who together with his 25-year-old Uncle Jack, is a seaman engaged in trade—and smuggling—with the Low Countries and Germany. It is the smuggler's vocation that brings Tom into contact...

The heroine of The Spanish Smile, Lucinda de Cabrillo y Benvides, is the sheltered only daughter of the proud descendant of Spanish conquistadors, Don Enrique. Cloistered away in a gloomy castle, Lucinda is allowed no radio, television, newspapers or even any book written in the 20th Century. Her father pursues a deranged dream of restoring Spanish rule to California. All of the gothic machinery is in place in this story: the castle with its mysterious crypt guarded by deadly serpents, the young girl in dis...

The Castle in the Sea is on an island off the coast of California. The time is the present. The heroine, Lucinda de Cabrillo y Benivides, has just become one of the richest young women in the world due to the horrible death of her father. However, she must deal with the legacy of madness her father left behind before she can begin to deal with her great wealth…. Lucinda's "novio" arrives, a young man whom she has never met yet to whom she has been promised since her childhood. Ne...

Early on [in Kathleen, Please Come Home] Kathleen, just 15, becomes engaged to a young wetback who warns her against the drugs friend Sybil is so free with. But Ramon is arrested and later killed in a raid, and when Kathleen realizes that it was her concerned, English-teacher mother who turned him in, she accepts Sybil's invitation to take off for Mexico … The two girls split when Kathleen learns that she's pregnant by Ramon, but get together again in time for an auto accident that is f...

A Mayan Indian legend tells of the god Kukulcan, who, grieving over a misdeed, left earth promising to return centuries later in the body of a young man who has come from the east. Scott O'Dell uses this legend in ["The Captive," the] first novel of a projected larger story called "City of the Seven Serpents." "The Captive" is narrated by Julian Escobar, a young, idealistic Jesuit seminarian in medieval Spain who travels to New Spain with an entrepreneur to c...

If Bright Morning gave her story to an anthropologist, she would tell it the way Scott O'Dell does in ["Sing Down the Moon"]. In simple statements, almost devoid of emotion, the Navaho girl relates her capture by Spanish slavers, her escape and return to Canyon de Chelly just before the United States Army moves against her people. Understatement counterpoints and emphasizes the wanton destruction of crops and livestock to starve the Navahos into submission, the tribe's suffering ...

[The title character of "Carlota"], trying for her father's sake to take the place of her dead brother Carlos, rides a stallion, brands cattle on their Southern California ranch, even takes part in one of the last battles of the Mexican War and, except for the battle, seems to relish her role…. I am impressed with the history … and with many of the scenes, but at the conclusion I cease to believe in the fiction…. When Scott O'Dell has Carlota free her grandmo...

The 290 seems set fair to be a roistering yarn about a young seaman aboard a Confederate raider. The foreword gives the clue to the disappointment of the book, however: the story is based very firmly on historical fact. As a result, the novel is almost a documentary, since one episode does not precipitate another in the patterned way we expect of narrative. The painstaking research becomes a straitjacket. A sailor is taken on board, leads a mutiny and is dismissed, never to be seen again. It does not matter...

O'Dell attempts a realistic portrayal of the Chicano culture in this fast-paced adventure story [Child of Fire]. He weaves together a fascinating tapestry of fact and fiction in this interpretation of Chicano culture: cock and bull fights, drugs, ghetto gangs, the farmworker's strikes…. The informed reader will find many of the elements of Chicano culture presented by O'Dell to be far off the mark, while others ring true. The teacher or librarian may wish to caution the reader ag...

[The Captive is a] brilliant first volume in a projected sequence…. We leave Julian, arrayed as … [a] god, surveying his newly acquired domain—sickened by the human sacrifices being made in his honor, but stirred moments later by visions of empire. And O'Dell leaves readers impatient for further developments. It is a measure of his seriousness and his skill that the suspense focuses not on events, which have so far been swift and stunning, inevitable and unexpected, or on the art...

In completing the trilogy which began with The Captive and The Feathered Serpent,… [in The Amethyst Ring] the author has carried to a logical conclusion the adventures and experiences of Julián Escobar…. A historical novel in the sense that the splendors and the horrors of the ancient Indian cultures of America are understandingly portrayed, the narrative related by the unhappy, unheroic protagonist is not merely an account of random adventures. The author has eschewed the grand scale a...

This eerie story [The Dark Canoe] is set on board a nineteenth-century vessel outward bound from Nantucket. At the start, the captain has apparently been murdered. He was the favourite brother of the cabinboy-narrator Nathan: golden Jeremy, in every way a contrast to lame scarred Caleb their eldest brother, who keeps to his cabin, having lost his captain's papers on Jeremy's evidence that he mishandled the ship-wrecked whaler for which they are searching…. This powerful story creates sp...

[In The 290, Scott O'Dell displays] his distinctive gifts for distilling significance from historical matter and for dealing with the sea. Jim Lynne, at sixteen an apprentice to a ship's architect for the 290 in Liverpool, immediately captures the reader's interest when in a pub on a "raving cold" November night he is approached by his ne'er-do-well, money-grubbing brother, who unsuccessfully seeks to buy information from him about the nearly finished vessel…...

Readers looking for pure escapism will find an ample portion of it in this novel about a young girl growing into adulthood [The Spanish Smile]. Award-winning novelist Scott O'Dell has not created an ordinary young girl as heroine of the latest of his impressive (Island of the Blue Dolphins, Sarah Bishop) children's books…. The novel features a wide diversity of characters, some innocent and admirable, others entirely corrupted. This diversity adds interest and color to this exotic story...

Despite the objective quality of the narrative [in Child of Fire], both the story and the characters lack dimension; and even if the author is aware of the historical, psychological, and linguistic elements of the Southwest, he fails to arouse a genuine interest in his hero. There are a few bright spots in the realistic scenes of bull fighting and cock fighting; but, in general, the offhand manner of the style only adds to the banality of the story. (pp. 695-96) Paul Heins, in a review of �...