Island of the Blue Dolphins

The wilderness survival story most often paired with Blue Dolphins — Brian is younger, alone for weeks rather than years, and his psychological experience of solitude is more anxious and dramatic

A boy chooses deliberate wilderness solitude — the inverse of Karana's involuntary isolation. George's ecological knowledge is as precise as O'Dell's, her animal relationships as specifically rendered

The reverse perspective — a domesticated creature returning to the wild. Both novels explore what happens when civilized and wild worlds meet, though London romanticizes the wild where O'Dell documents it

Cross-cultural friendship across language barriers, colonial period, survival in wilderness — structurally similar but the power dynamic in Speare's novel is inverted from O'Dell's

A girl violating the norms of her society to survive and discover herself — Avi's Charlotte faces social structures where Karana faces physical ones, but both novels are about a girl discovering she can do what she was told she could not

Another novel centering a young woman's resilience under historical conditions that strip away everything familiar — Ryan's California is 1930s migrant labor where O'Dell's is 1835 island isolation