A fire is a shape. It has a fast end, two slow sides, and a burnt back, and every decision anyone makes inside one is about which part of that shape they are standing in and which way it is going. That is not a feeling. It is geometry, and geometry is what a picture is for.
This is the drawn version of Lauren Tarshis's 2018 wildfire story. Josh, his cousin Holly, a forest, and a fire that gets between them and everything else. Text adapted by Georgia Ball, art by Cassie Anderson. Graphic novel thirteen, full colour, $14.99, with a nonfiction section at the back carrying facts and photographs of the real event.
The chapter book of the same story is on our shelf at less than half the price. Before you decide, the rest of this note is about what the extra money actually buys.
The science it actually teaches
It sits on the Stealth Science shelf for fire behaviour, which is different from the prose edition's subject. That one is about the conditions that make a fire possible, and conditions are slow and invisible and belong in sentences. This one is about a fire that already exists and is moving, and everything in that is position, direction and speed.
Embers first, because this is the fact that surprises adults. A wind driven fire throws burning material out ahead of itself, sometimes a very long way. Most houses that are lost in a wildfire are not lit by a wall of flame arriving. They are lit by embers landing on them, in a gutter or a vent or a woodpile, well before the front gets there.
Which means spot fires. Those embers start new fires downwind of the main one, so the fire in front of a person is not necessarily the fire that will reach them, and ground that was safe a minute ago can be alight behind them. Drawn on a page, that is instantly clear. Written down it takes a paragraph and still slides off.
Then slope. Flames lean over whatever is above them, drying and heating that fuel before they get to it, so a fire climbs a hill far faster than it comes down one. This is why going downhill and across is the survivable direction and why running uphill from a fire is the worst instinct a body has.
Then the shape itself. The head of a fire is the fast end, pushed by the wind. The flanks move sideways and much slower. The back barely moves at all. Almost everything dangerous is at one end of the thing, which is why where you are matters more than how big it is.
A large fire also makes its own weather. It pulls air in at the base and shoves a column of heat and smoke upward, and that indraft is why a big fire does not behave like a campfire scaled up.
And the one that gets people. Smoke and heated air arrive before flame. Visibility drops, breathing gets hard, and that is what stops somebody from moving while they still could. In the art, that is the panel where the sky goes the wrong colour.
The child it lands with
A child who thinks in space. The one who builds, who reads maps for fun, who can tell you the layout of a place they visited once. That child gets more from this edition than from the prose one, and it is not because the prose is too hard for them.
The reluctant reader, obviously, and the one who reads only comics and gets a bit of grief about it at home.
And a child who has already read the chapter book. This is not a re-read, it is the same events shown as a map, and the two together are the whole picture.
Not for a child who is already carrying fire anxiety on their own. Colour art of a burning forest is not a gentle way in.
One place to stop and talk
Find the panel with the first ember lifting off. Put a finger on it and ask where it is going to land.
That is the whole lesson, in one question, on one page.
What to know going in
The art is loud, and that is the honest headline of this note.
A wildfire drawn in full colour, with animals running and buildings alight, is a much bigger thing to look at than the same events described. The chapter book lets a child move past a hard sentence. A panel is already in the eyes. Both editions carry a 2 to 5 band, and that band is about the words. It is not a ruling on what a seven year old should be looking at, and only you can make that one.
The 2018 season killed real people, including dozens in one northern California town that was very nearly wiped off the map that November. The town and the family in this story are invented. The season was not.
Josh's family has broken apart before the story begins, and it is still broken at the end.
If your family has evacuated from a fire, or lives somewhere it is a live possibility, this is a drawing of your own worst day. That is not a reason to skip it. It is a reason to be on the couch next to them rather than in the next room.
The back matter has photographs of the real fires. Look at that section yourself before they do.
Where to get it
It is $14.99 at I Survived the California Wildfires, 2018 graphic novel.
Say the awkward part out loud: fifteen dollars is real money for a book a fluent reader will finish in forty minutes. Full colour costs what it costs, and you are not getting more story than the $6.99 paperback of the same thing gives you.
So it comes down to which child is in your house. If yours reads chapter books happily, buy the paperback and put the seven dollar difference into a second book. If yours stalls at prose, this is the version that gets finished, and a finished book is worth more than a cheap unfinished one every time.
Both editions together only makes sense if you have two children at different reading points, or one who read the prose a year or two back and would come to it again as a map. Otherwise it is the same story bought twice.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
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
The Grizzlies, 1967 in Panels: How to Read a Bear
I Survived the Attack of the Grizzlies, 1967 (I Survived Graphic Novel #5) by Lauren Tarshis
Grade 2 to 5
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
California Wildfires, 2018: A Fire Starts Years Early
I Survived the California Wildfires, 2018 (I Survived #20) 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.
