Young Man and the Sea?

I always read all of the books on the Rebecca Caudill list in middle school, as I read all the Abraham Lincoln books in high school. As I was reading The Old Man and the Sea it felt like I had read a story like that before. I was thinking about it and I realized that in fifth grade there was a book called The Young Man and the Sea by Rodman Philbrick on the Rebecca Caudill list. The only thing that I remembered from reading it five years ago was the boy in the story was fishing by himself and almost died. Those two facts led my to do some research to see if that book was just a knock off of Hemingway's novel. Apparently it was, although the author says it was just a "homage" (Rockman par 3) to The Old Man and the Sea.

The themes of Hemingway's book are reusable (epic hero-ish characteristics, bond between old man and young boy and the bond between man, Santiago, and creature, marlin, and the circle of life/ death is not always a bad thing) as Philbrick's book shows. That also shows how timeless and classic The Old Man and the Sea is when it is rewritten into a new book with different characters, but the same basic plot and similar title. If a book can spawn knockoffs then the book has to have been successful. A knockoff book means that someone took the time to get really into a novel and change it enough to make it their own (like all of the knockoffs of Harry Potter [sidenote: most of the knockoffs kind of suck except for the Charlie Bone octet series]).

In short this post was a slight ramble about knockoffs and the fact that people run out of original material and have to redo older novels. Very few knockoffs are better than the original, but then again the original is the first and always the best. If I read The Old Man and the Sea in fifth grade instead of The Young Man and the Sea I wouldn't have remembered it five years later. The Young Man and the Sea was a nice preview and introduction that was engaging to kids, but it was no substitute for the real thing.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner, 2003. Print.

Rockman, Connie. "The Young Man and the Sea Discussion Guide." Scholastic Teaching Resources. Scholastic. Web. 04 July 2011.