Dear Dolphin

by Herbert Kenny

A girl searching for the Lost Atlantis is accompanied by a witty dolphin who introduces her to the sea creatures

174 pages, Hardcover

First published November 12, 1967

Reviews

[Matthias Ferber · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a charming but quite forgotten children's book from the 1960s, long out of print. When I was little I found it on the shelves at the children's library in Newton, Massachusetts, and loved it. Over the years I forgot the title and most of the content, but a few stray details stuck in my mind, and every few years I would remember the book and go Google-hunting for it, using the few unique phrases I still remembered, but I never got anywhere. It was really frustrating. Then, during one of those attempts a couple of months ago, it suddenly occurred to me that I might have garbled one of those sentences in my memory (the sentence was, "The dimity bird has alighted in the denim tree", so you can imagine), and, on un-garbling it, I finally, FINALLY got a hit — ironically, on a web forum where someone was trying to remember the same book. But in their case someone knew the answer, and at last I had my title. I promptly ordered a used copy off eBay, and tonight I finished it.

I had remembered the book as a delightful undersea adventure filled with wordplay, along the lines of The Phantom Tollbooth and, perhaps more aptly, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It turns out that I rather exaggerated the level of wordplay in my memory, and the book isn't quite up to par with those stellar predecessors, but it's nevertheless utterly playful and great fun. It concerns a thirteen year-old girl, Ann, from Manchester, Massachusetts, who befriends a rather supercilious dolphin at the shoreline and joins him for a tour of the ocean world, meeting characters such as the Right Lobster, the Saw Serpent, and an Atlantean dugong princess named Delia. (Spoiler: it turns out at the end she was dreaming. OR WAS SHE?) It's quite imaginative, and the illustrations, by Kelly Oechsli, are wonderful (see the cover here to get a sense of the style).

Here are the things I remembered and have been trying to find on Google all these years:

* Ann sees a color she's never seen before, and calls it "twirl" to help her remember.

* She meets the pirate Captain Teach (the real name of Blackbeard), although I couldn't remember if he was a friend or enemy.

* She meets three monkeys, the Evil brothers: Seeno, Speakno, and Hearno (this was close but not exactly right).

* At a crucial plot juncture, the characters require a "dimity bird" to land in a "denim tree"; one of them explains that her family used that phrase ("the dimity bird has alighted in the denim tree") when a conversation lapses, and so they discuss how to start a conversation that can lapse, and when they can't figure out how to do it and go quiet, the dimity bird suddenly... well, you get it.

Recommended for actual children, or for non-children who still like this kind of story, if you can get your hands on a copy (I have one available!). It's delightful, and I greatly enjoyed rereading it after all these decades.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my favorite book from childhood. The undersea adventures of thirteen year old Ann and her dolphin guide.

[T. · Rating 4 out of 5]

My best friend in middle school amd I loved this one - we were probably the only ones in our small town that ever checked it out. Sadly, it has since been discarded.

[Adrienne Marie]

The best of best books. The Book of Adrienne Sense.