A young, mostly deaf woman becomes part of a research project in the mid-1960s in this compelling novel that explores human and dolphin social bonds and communication.
The Dolphin House by Audrey Schulman (Three Weeks in December) draws its inspiration from an experiment that took place in 1965. Cora is working as a waitress at a dockside restaurant on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands when, on a walk, she comes across four dolphins held in a lagoon. A scientist there asks Cora to keep notes while he steps away. The head of the project, Dr. Blum, is impressed with her observational skills and offers her a job. As Cora bonds with the dolphins, she takes on the role of their advocate and protector, eventually embarking on an ambitious project in which she lives with a dolphin named Junior in an attempt to teach him human speech.
Schulman's signature blend of science and literary fiction is on full display as Cora studies two different sets of minds, the dolphins' and the male scientists', all of whom to varying degrees view her as separate from their world. At best, they assume women are innately suited to teach language as part of a maternal instinct; at worst, she is treated as a novelty or a sex object. Readers will admire and feel for Cora as she uses her growing expertise--and her own experience analyzing different types of communication--in a quest to carve out some security for the dolphins and for herself. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library