THE CAY by Theodore Taylor (1969)

Delacorte Press, 1987 edition. 137 pages. ISBN: 0385079060. Winner of a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, 1970, and the Jane Addams Children's Book Award, 1970, which was revoked five years later due to controversy surrounding the author's portrayal of Timothy, one of the book's main characters, who speaks in a Creole dialect.

Phillip Enright is an 11-year-old American living on the Dutch-occupied island of Curaçao during World War II. His father works for a local oil refinery, a target of German submarines that also happen to be torpedoing ships off the coast, and his mother decides that the island is no longer safe—she decides to take her son back home to Virginia. But tragedy strikes shortly after they depart when their ship is torpedoed as well; Phillip is hit in the back of the head with a piece of timber and blacks out during the evacuation, and when he wakes up he's on a raft with Timothy, a shipmate who rescued him from certain death in the water.

Timothy was born in the West Indies. He grew up with nothing, and doesn't know his own birthday. He and Phillip have nothing in common, but he will protect Phillip at any cost, and they must work together to stay alive, especially once they land on a small island, or cay, located in a forgotten part of the Caribbean that Timothy refers to as "the Devil's Mouth." A fast-paced, suspenseful story that provides poignant lessons on racial tolerance and the ties that bind all men together, The Cay is a mesmerizing reading experience. —Robert Cass