You remember this one. Your child does not.
That gap is the reason this note runs longer than the others on this shelf, and it is the reason the caution near the bottom is the most important part of it.
Ranger, the golden retriever who travels through time with an old first aid kit, arrives in New Orleans while the city is emptying out. He meets Clare Porter, who is trying to find her grandmother. Once they find her, the three of them shelter at Nana's house in the Lower Ninth Ward and wait for Clare's father, who went out for gas and has not come back. The weather turns. Then the levees go, the water comes into the house, and Clare and Nana are separated.
It is book eight, it is about a hundred pages with pictures, and it is written for a second to fifth grade reader.
The science it actually teaches
This is why it earns a place on our Stealth Science shelf, and the science here is not weather trivia. It is the difference between a storm and a flood.
A hurricane runs on warm sea water. That is the fuel and there is no other. It is why the season peaks in late summer when the Gulf is at its warmest, and it is why a storm starts falling apart as soon as it crosses land and loses the water underneath it. In this story, that matters: the wind was mostly finished before the worst thing happened.
The water that kills is not the rain. It is surge. The wind of a big storm piles the sea up ahead of itself and shoves it inland, which is why hurricane warnings talk about feet of water rather than miles per hour. Rain falls on you. Surge arrives.
Then the part that makes New Orleans New Orleans. A lot of the city sits lower than the water beside it, with the river on one side and a very large lake on the other. Living there works because of levees and floodwalls, which are built things that people design, build, inspect and maintain. In 2005 they failed in more than one place, and a city shaped like a bowl filled up. That is an engineering failure. It is not the same kind of event as a storm, and if your child takes one thing out of this book it should be that sentence.
The Lower Ninth Ward, where the book puts Clare and Nana, is among the lowest ground in the city with water on more than one side of it. Water there rose toward the rooftops. That is why this story is about an attic and a roof and not about a wet carpet.
Now the honest part. This is a hundred pages for an eight year old. It gives your child a line of water climbing the inside of a house and a dog swimming. It does not give the mechanism of a floodwall breach, or the difference between a wall being overtopped and a wall giving way, or a single number. What it does give, and this is more than most adults carry, is the right order of events.
The child it lands with
You are the variable here, more than your child is. If you are going to read it alongside them and answer what comes after, it lands with almost any child in the band. If you were planning to hand it over and get an hour back, it lands badly, and the rest of this note explains why.
Beyond that: a child who can be frightened inside a book and come out the other side. A child who has already met Ranger somewhere else in the series and trusts that he gets everyone home. And, carefully, a child who has been through real weather of their own, because that can go either way and you already know which way it goes in your house.
One place to stop and talk
When the water starts coming up through the floor, put the book face down and say out loud that this is not the rain.
The rain had largely stopped by then. What broke was a wall, and a wall is a thing people build and people are supposed to look after, and it broke in more than one place on the same day. A child of eight can hold that distinction, and it is the most useful idea in the book.
A storm is nobody's fault. A wall is somebody's job.
What to know going in
This is the hardest book to recommend on this shelf, and it is worth being exact about why.
More than a thousand people died in Katrina, most of them in Louisiana, most of them in the flooding. This book puts no body on the page. Your child will close it with the impression that everyone got out, and that impression is wrong. Correcting it is your job, not the book's.
Who got out and who did not was decided in large part by who owned a working car, who had money for gas and a motel at the end of the month, and who was old, sick, or looking after somebody who was. The Lower Ninth Ward, where this story is set, was a Black neighborhood with a high rate of home ownership, and it was among the worst hit and the slowest to come back. None of that is in the book. That is not a failure of the book. It is a hundred pages for a child who is learning to read chapters, and it cannot carry it. It lands on you instead.
Help did not come for days. People waited on rooftops, and in the Superdome and the convention center, without working water or toilets, in August heat, on television, in the United States. A child who reads only this book will believe the rescue worked.
And this is recent. People who were children in that water have their own children now, and some of them are your child's age. If you are in Louisiana or Mississippi, or your family is, none of this is news to you and you already know how to handle it.
On the page itself: a family split up, a grandmother in danger, a father missing for most of the book, water rising inside a house, and animals left behind. It is frightening in the way it ought to be. There is a dog and there is a rescue, so it lands softly, and that soft landing is the exact thing you have to push past afterward.
Where to get it
Buy this one only if you are going to read it alongside your child and stay for the conversation on the other side. Skip it if you were hoping for a book you could hand over and get an hour back. Almost everything else on this shelf can be handed over.
Hurricane Katrina Rescue is $7.99, and it costs you an evening on top of the money. If you have the evening it is worth twice the price, because it is a very good door into something your child is going to meet eventually anyway.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Escape from the Great Earthquake: The Fire Did the Damage
Escape from the Great Earthquake (Ranger in Time #6) by Kate Messner
Grade 2 to 5
Ash and Smoke: What a Volcano Actually Drops on You
Journey Through Ash and Smoke (Ranger in Time #5) by Kate Messner
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 in Panels: How Fire Moves
I Survived the California Wildfires, 2018 (I Survived Graphic Novel #13) 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.
