Thy Friend, Obadiah details a unique friendship that forms between a young boy, Obadiah, and a sea gull. Obadiah, a young Quaker living in colonial Nantucket, gets very frustrated when a sea gull continually follows him around town and throughout his errands. In fact, he wishes at one point that he would just go away. And it does.
Until, one day, the Obadiah sets out to do some errands for his Mother and gets caught in a snowstorm. He wishes for the sea gull to be there in order to help him home, but the gull is nowhere to be found. Obadiah searches for days and days and still cannot find his faithful "friend," then he finds a group of gulls by the wharf. One of them was his friend, but had a wish hook wrapped around his beak. Obadiah unwrapped the hook and line and the gull flew out to the lighthouse. From that point on, Obadiah's friend visited his window at home and watched over him while he traveled around town. Finally, at the end of the story, Obadiah realizes that the sea gull was a true friend.
Thy Friend Obadiah demonstrates the idea that friendships can form between even those who do not seem to have much in common, whether it be on the inside or outside. The book uses language such as "thee" and "thy", which can be somewhat confusing, and I used this book to support a class to instroduce a novel that I am reading with my class, Who Comes With Cannons? The Quaker religion and and use of language is also used within this story, and can be somewhat confusing to students had I not supplemented with other texts prior to this novel. The novel focuses on the Civil War and its main characters are Quakers who run a station in the Underground Railroad. Stay tuned for more as I will blog about this book in the near future!
How did your students react the friendship that the characters formed? Were they able to make a connection to their own experiences. I love how this story’s theme can be used to model how friendships can often come from unlikely places/people according to some people’s prejudgments. But it teaches us to have an open-mind and remain kind hearted. It’s like the cliché says, we can’t judge a book by its cover.
ReplyDelete