Mary Anneliese and I read this book together, and it is such a sweet, charming, simple little book. We read it at the same time I was reading Same Kind of Different As Me, and I was struck at how much the two books were similar. Though written fifty years apart, they both tell the story of accepting and learning to love people, despite cultural differences. The Courage of Sarah Noble, written in 1954 by Alice Dalgliesh, is the story of a young pioneer girl who moves with her father to a new land. She helps him for many months as he builds a new home for the family they have left back home. All is well, until it is time for Father to go back home and move the family to the new land. There isn’t room for Sarah to go along, and so she is forced to stay in the new land with an Indian family. She is afraid. The Indians are unlike her. They have different customs, wear different clothes, eat different foods, speak a different language. How will she live among them for months?
Though the two books are so different, really the story they tell is universal. We would all do well to open ourselves up to different types of people, accepting and embracing our differences. For it is in opening ourselves up that we find we really aren’t that different after all.
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