The Music of Dolphins, by Karen Hesse

Karen Hesse

Karen Hesse is an American author of children's literature and literature for young adults, often with historical settings.-Life:...

, is a children's book that follows the story of Mila (translated as an abbreviated form of the Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 word for "miracle"), a feral child

Feral child

A feral child is a human child who has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age, and has no experience of human care, loving or social behavior, and, crucially, of human language...

 raised by a pod of dolphin

Dolphin

Dolphins are marine mammals that are closely related to whales and porpoises. There are almost forty species of dolphin in 17 genera. They vary in size from and , up to and . They are found worldwide, mostly in the shallower seas of the continental shelves, and are carnivores, mostly eating...

s around the Florida Keys

Florida Keys

The Florida Keys are a coral archipelago in southeast United States. They begin at the southeastern tip of the Florida peninsula, about south of Miami, and extend in a gentle arc south-southwest and then westward to Key West, the westernmost of the inhabited islands, and on to the uninhabited Dry...

 and Caribbean

Caribbean

The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...

.

The novel uses a narrative structure that parallels Mila's increasing comprehension of English. At the novel's opening, when Mila is with the dolphins and cannot speak English, the story is told from a neutral third person

Grammatical person

Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...

 (Mila's POV) perspective.