Barry's family packs the car to get out of New Orleans. Then his little sister gets sick, too sick to sit in a jammed highway for half a day, and they stay.
That is the opening stretch of the book and it is the most valuable thing in it. Katrina arrives, the night looks survivable, and then the levees let go. Barry is swept away from his family by the floodwater and spends most of the story alone with a dog. There is a nonfiction section at the back with photographs of the real event.
The science it actually teaches
It sits on our Stealth Science shelf for one idea that most adults never got taught: a city can be dry at midnight and drowned by morning with the storm already gone.
Start underneath the houses. Much of New Orleans sits lower than the water beside it. Some of that is where the city is, and some of it is what people did to the ground. Marsh was drained so it could be built on, and drained ground settles, and it keeps settling for a very long time afterward. Parts of the city are lower now than when they were built. Living there works because pumps run. On an ordinary hard rain, the water does not run off anywhere. It gets lifted out.
Now the order of events, because the order is the lesson. The worst wind went past and the city looked like it had been missed. The flooding came afterward, in the dark. Barry's family believes the bad part is behind them, and they are wrong in a way that has nothing to do with weather. Storms end. Water does not.
Two different things can go wrong with a wall that holds water back, and a child can hold the difference. Water can come over the top, which stops when the water outside drops. Or the wall can give way, and an opening in a wall does not close itself when the sky clears. Water keeps pouring through it until the level inside matches the level outside. A city shaped like a bowl fills all the way to the brim. That is why the flooding in 2005 got worse for days after the storm had left the state.
Then the water itself, which is the part your child will feel in the chest. A cubic foot of water weighs about sixty two pounds and has no opinion about what it is pushing. Water above the knee, moving at walking speed, takes a grown adult off their feet. Barry is not swept away because he is small or because he did something foolish. He is swept away because that is what moving water does to people. If your child takes one physical fact out of this book, make it that one, and make it about the ditch at the end of your own road.
And the piece the book quietly gets right. Leaving is not a decision. It is a logistics problem. It needs a car that runs, fuel in it, money at the end of the month, somewhere at the other end to sleep, and everybody in the house well enough to travel. Barry's family fails one of those tests. In 2005 a great many real families failed one of those tests, and the reason was almost never that they did not believe the forecast.
The child it lands with
A ten year old who has been handed Katrina as one sentence and one photograph. This gives them a person, a sequence and a reason, which is three more things than the sentence gave them.
A reader who already knows the shape of this series will do well here too: the narrator lives, the disaster is real, the back matter is true. That shape is what makes a frightening subject bearable at eight.
Be careful with a child who has been evacuated for real, from anything, including fire. That child is not going to read this as history.
One place to stop and talk
Wait for the question. It always comes, and it usually arrives as some version of why did they not just leave.
Answer it with the car. Ask what leaving costs and let your child work it out on their fingers: gas, a hotel, food on the road, days off work, and a sister who is too sick to sit up in the back seat. Then ask what a family does when the answer comes to more money than they have. That is the whole conversation, and it takes four minutes.
What to know going in
More than a thousand people died in Katrina, most of them in Louisiana and most of them in the flooding. Nobody dies on the page of this book. Your child will close it believing everybody got out, and that belief is false. Correcting it is your job.
Who got out and who did not came down in large part to money, a working car, health and age. The neighborhoods that flooded worst and came back slowest were Black neighborhoods, and that was not an accident of rainfall. Help took days to arrive, in this country, on television, in August heat. A book for grades 2 to 5 cannot carry any of that, and this one does not try. The back matter is facts and photographs, not an account of what went wrong.
This is also living memory. Adults who were children in that water now have children the age of yours. If you are in Louisiana or Mississippi, none of this is news to you.
On the page: a family split apart, a sick child, a boy alone in deep water at night, animals in trouble, and real fear. It is drawn, so the water and the dark are things your child looks at rather than imagines, and for some readers that is easier and for some it is considerably harder.
Where to get it
It is $14.99 at I Survived Hurricane Katrina, 2005.
If you are picking one Tarshis title off this shelf to sit beside a weather unit, do not start here. Start with the Great Molasses Flood, which is strange and physical and asks nothing of you afterward, and come back to Katrina when you have a free evening to sit on the other side of it. This book costs money and then it costs a conversation, and the conversation is the part worth paying for.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
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
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.
