First Published: 1940

Rating: Great

"It happened many years ago, before the traders and missionaries first came into the South Seas, while the Polynesians were still great in number and fierce of heart."

Armstrong Sperry's Call It Courage tells a good story, but its charm lies more in Sperry's attention to detail than the plot itself. You'll never be in doubt as to how the story's going to end, but you'll be rooting for the protagonist all along.

The story starts out in an interesting setting--an atoll in Polynesia. Mafatu, also known as the Boy Who Was Afraid, doesn't make out as well as the Boy Who Lived does in current fiction; instead, everyone regards him as a coward because he is afraid to go into the sea. But you probably wouldn't be too thrilled with the sea if you'd been caught in a canoe during a hurricane and your mother had died getting you back to safety.

Apparently, that's not a good enough excuse, so Mafatu endures the shame that comes from staying home and doing "women's work." The day before all the boys on the island are set to go off and hunt bonitos in some grand rite of passage to prove their manhood, Mafatu overhears the rest of the boys deriding him for his lack of courage.

So he does what anyone would do--he grabs his dog Uri and, guided by his pet albatross Kivi, hops into a canoe and goes out into the sea to prove his mettle. He ends up on an island that may or may not be populated by the eaters-of-men and must use his skills to survive and, of course, learn the true meaning of courage.

He's one resourceful thirteen-year-old, I'll give him that. He never faces any of the struggles you think a young lad might face when he's on his own. He never has a problem finding food, building a shelter, or--most puzzling of all--skillfully canoeing through the Pacific. Guess he picked that up on one of those fishing trips he took before he was sent home to make spears.

 Come to that, Mafatu gets over his fear of the sea awfully quick, but that's only one of a few times in Call It Courage where the plot comes across as contrived. It's redeemed, though, by all the detail about the sea and the island Mafatu visits. Sperry has a way of making ordinary scenes beautiful by pointing out the poetic in something as simple as a school of fish.

Call It Courage is a great book for boys, but anyone can enjoy it. And even if it proves not to be you or your child's cup of tea, it's a quick read at under 100 pages, so there's always the knowledge that you won't have to read about Mafatu and his brave antics for too much longer.