A Newbery Honor Book From the depths of a cave in the Vermilion Sea, Ramon Salazar has wrested a black pearl so lustrous and captivating that his father, an expert pearl dealer, is certain Ramon has found the legendary Pearl of Heaven. Such a treasure is sure to bring great joy to the villagers of their tiny coastal town, and even greater renown to the Salazar name. No diver, not even the swaggering Gaspar Ruiz, has ever found a pearl like this! But is there a price to pay for a prize so great? When a terrible tragedy strikes the village, old Luzon’s warning about El Diablo returns to haunt Ramon. If El Diablo actually exists, it will take all Ramon’s courage to face the winged creature waiting for him offshore. Like the author's Newbery Medal-winning classic Island of the Blue Dolphins, Scott O'Dell's The Black Pearl is a gripping tale of survival, strength, and courage.

A new interpretation of the rich and highly complex medieval English poem Pearl is presented in this book. Medieval symbolism as a whole, especially the artistic problem of representing the apocalyptic and the ineffable, gains illumination from the author's approach. Deriving its critical premises from medieval aesthetics and symbolic theory, the book employs two key metaphoric concepts: the anagogic dissimilar similitude and the incarnational symbol. The former emphasizes the incongruity between the finite means and the infinite object of representation, physical image and spiritual essence, the human and the divine. The incarnational symbol seeks the reconciliation of these opposing natures on a sacramental level. The Pearl Poet, like Dante, translates the tension among levels of perception--sensory, affective, intellectual --into an existential drama. Pearl presents man and God as antagonists in a drama of faith, the pearl as a symbol for the kingdom of God--a symbol at once alluring and terrifying. Through the experience of the poem's chief character, the dreamer, the reader learns the Eucharistic reconciliation: "divine pleasure takes on the warm familiarity of earthly pleasure, and earthly pleasure is redeemed and elevated to its ideal form, which is in God."