Call It Courage

Mafatu, whose name means Stout Heart though the island around him treats the name as a bitter joke, is a chief's son on the Pacific island of Hikueru who has been terrified of the sea since childhood, ever since he watched his mother drown protecting him during a storm at sea when he was a small boy. That fear marks him as an outsider among a people who live and prove themselves entirely by the ocean, and rather than keep enduring the other islanders' contempt, Mafatu sets out alone in a small canoe, with only his dog Uri and a pet albatross named Kivi for company, determined to face the sea that killed his mother and either overcome his fear or die trying. A storm wrecks his canoe on a deserted island, and Mafatu survives there through his own steadily growing skill and nerve, hunting and fishing, building tools and weapons, and facing down a series of real dangers, a hammerhead shark, a wild boar, an octopus, each a direct test of the courage his own name promises but that he has never actually felt until now. He discovers a sacrificial altar on the island that marks it as territory used by a group of raiding cannibals, and when they do return, he narrowly escapes and makes his way back home transformed, skilled, self possessed, and finally unafraid of the water that once defined his shame. His father barely recognizes the boy who left, and Mafatu's return, and the story of how he earned it, becomes a legend the island tells about itself from then on.

Sperry, who traveled through the South Pacific himself and drew on stories he heard there, illustrates the book with his own woodcut style drawings, and the novel reads fast and plainly, a short, tightly built survival story rather than a long one, well suited to readers just old enough to want real danger in their adventure fiction without much complexity layered on top of it. Its central arc, a frightened boy proving his courage entirely to himself rather than for anyone else's approval, has kept it a durable choice for readers working through fear of their own regardless of setting.