Ask a nine year old how a wildfire starts and you will get a match, a lightning bolt, or a campfire nobody put out. All three are answers to the wrong question. The fire started years before that, in the rain.
Lauren Tarshis puts eleven year old Josh in a small northern California town, sent across the country from New Jersey with his mother after a year that came apart. He is out of place and unimpressed, until his cousin drags him into the woods and the two of them end up in front of a fire moving faster than anything either has seen.
Book twenty. Short paperback, $6.99. Built on the 2018 California fire season, which the publisher describes as the deadliest in a century and the most destructive in the state's history.
The science it actually teaches
It is on the Stealth Science shelf for the mechanism, and the mechanism here is mostly invisible and mostly slow, which is exactly what prose is good at.
Everything starts with three things. Fuel, oxygen, heat. A fire needs all three at once and it stops when it loses any one of them, and every single thing a firefighter does is an attempt to take one of them away. Water takes the heat. A cleared strip of dirt takes the fuel. Nobody takes the oxygen, which is why the other two get all the work.
Then the part almost no adult knows either. It is not how much fuel there is, it is how wet the fuel is. Dead grass, brush, needles and duff hold water, and how much they are still holding decides whether a fire crawls or runs. Fire crews measure it. They can tell you what today's fuel moisture is the way you can tell what today's temperature is.
Which gives you the pattern that makes bad seasons. A wet spring grows a great deal of new grass and brush. A long dry summer and autumn cure all of it. You need both. A dry year alone does not do it, because there is not much to burn, and a wet year alone does not do it either. Two seasons in a row, in the wrong order, do.
Then the ladder. Low branches and shrubs are a staircase from the ground into the tops of the trees. A fire on the floor is one animal. A fire in the crowns is a different one entirely, and the whole practice of thinning forest is about breaking the staircase.
Now the century of good intentions. For about a hundred years the policy was to put out every fire, including the small slow ones that used to clear the floor without touching the big trees. It worked, and the fuel that those small fires used to eat is all still there. That is the sentence to make sure your child hears: the fuel did not appear, it accumulated, and it accumulated because of a decision.
And last, the wind that dries. In northern California in the autumn, dry inland air pours downhill toward the coast, and air that comes downhill warms up and its humidity drops. Put single digit humidity together with strong wind and cured fuel and you have what the forecasters call fire weather, and it is forecast before a single thing is alight. The fire is the last thing to arrive, not the first.
The drawn edition on our shelf takes the other half of this, which is what a fire does once it is running. This note is about what makes one possible.
The child it lands with
The child who watches the weather. Some of them do, obsessively, and there is almost nothing written for that child at this reading level.
The one who is on book twelve of the series and starting to skim, because this is the entry where the science under the story is genuinely worth slowing down for.
A child who lives where this happens. That one is carefully. It can give a frightened child something solid to hold, and it can hand a calm child a fear they did not have. You know which of those is likelier in your house.
One place to stop and talk
Do not stop at the flames. Stop at the smoke, the first time they see it and before anything is burning near them.
Two questions, and neither is about how scared anybody is. Which way is the wind going. What is between the fire and the people. Everything anyone does in a wildfire follows from those two answers, and a child who takes only that away has more than most adults carry.
If you live somewhere it matters, go outside afterward and answer both questions about your own house.
What to know going in
Real people died in 2018. One northern California town was very nearly wiped off the map that November, with dozens of deaths, and though the town in the book is invented the season is not and the deaths were not.
The fire on the page is frightening, and animals and homes are in it. Tarshis writes for a nine year old and does not linger, but she also does not pretend.
Josh's family has come apart. He and his mother have moved across the country because of it, he is angry about things he cannot say out loud, and the book does not tidy that up by the last page. For some children that honesty is the best thing in it. For a child in the middle of the same thing, read it first.
And this one matters more than usual: if you live where fire runs, a novel is not an evacuation plan. Make the real one, with the real routes, and do not let a story stand in for it.
Where to get it
It is $6.99 at I Survived the California Wildfires, 2018. The later books in this series run a dollar or two above the early ones, which is a printing question and not a quality one.
Of all the disasters in the series, this is the one your family is most likely to actually meet, and that changes what the book is for. It is not a history lesson. It is the closest thing to useful that a $7 novel gets.
If you are only buying one edition of this story, and most families should, this is the one for a child who reads. The drawn version costs more than twice as much and does a different job, which is the next paragraph on a different page, not a reason to buy both.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Attack of the Grizzlies, 1967: Who Fed the Bears
I Survived the Attack of the Grizzlies, 1967 (I Survived #17) by Lauren Tarshis
Grade 2 to 5
The Dust Bowl, 1935: Drought Was Not the Disaster
I Survived the Dust Bowl, 1935 (I Survived #25) by Lauren Tarshis
Grade 2 to 5
California Wildfires, 2018 in Panels: How Fire Moves
I Survived the California Wildfires, 2018 (I Survived Graphic Novel #13) by Lauren Tarshis
Grade 2 to 5
Hurricane Katrina, 2005: Why They Could Not Leave
I Survived Hurricane Katrina, 2005 (I Survived Graphic Novel #6) by Lauren Tarshis
Grade 2 to 5
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
