Here is the fact the book is built on. Nobody in Pompeii knew the mountain was a volcano.
There had been no eruption in anyone's memory or their grandparents' memory. Vesuvius was farmland most of the way up, with vines on it. The ground shook sometimes and the town shrugged, because it always had. Marcus is afraid and cannot say why, and his father, who trusts what he can work out over the beast in the old stories, has nothing in his working out that would help. Then the mountain fires a cloud of ash and rock into the sky and it starts raining stone.
It is the tenth book in this line, text adapted by Georgia Ball, art by Dave Shephard, with a nonfiction section and photographs at the back.
The science it actually teaches
Two things, and the second one is unusual enough that it is the reason this book is on our Stealth Science shelf.
The first is what an eruption of this kind actually does, which is almost nothing your child expects. Magma coming up is full of dissolved gas. Near the top the gas comes out of solution and tears the rock apart on the way, and what leaves the mountain is not a river of lava but a column of shredded rock and gas fired kilometres into the air. What comes down first is pumice, rock so full of gas bubbles that it floats on water, and it comes down for hours until roofs give way under the pile of it.
Then the part that killed Pompeii. A column like that stays up because hot gas is rising fast underneath it. When it can no longer hold itself up, it falls back down, and the whole mass runs downhill hugging the ground as a cloud of gas, ash and rock that moves faster than anyone can run and is hot enough to kill in seconds. That is what reached the towns. Not lava. Almost no lava is involved anywhere in this story, and if your child comes out of the book knowing that one correction, the book has done more than most museum labels do.
The second thing is the one I would actually buy it for. Ash is why we know anything.
Normally a Roman town dies slowly. Timber rots, metal is taken, walls are pulled down for stone, later people build on top of the site. What survives is the temples and the paperwork of the rich. Pompeii was sealed under metres of pumice and ash inside a day and then left alone, and so it kept the parts nobody bothers to save: bread in an oven, paint on the walls, cart ruts worn into the road, insults scratched by hand where anybody could read them. A disaster made a data set. That is a real idea about how we know things, and children can hold it.
The casts belong here too, and it is worth being exact with your child because the pictures mislead. Those are not bodies and they are not statues. Bodies decayed inside ash that had set hard around them, which left a hole shaped like a person. Someone worked out that you could pour plaster into the hole and lift out the shape. It is a technique, invented, and it is why we have the shape of a dog straining at a chain from two thousand years ago.
One more, and it is the best of all for a child who is starting to ask how anybody knows. A teenager on the far side of the bay watched the whole thing and wrote down what he saw: the shape of the cloud, the timing, the ash, the dark. Those letters are still used as evidence by people who study volcanoes, and this type of eruption is named after him. Careful observation, written down plainly, still working two thousand years later.
The child it lands with
The Rome child. There is always one, and they usually arrive through gladiators and stay for the plumbing.
This also suits a reader who has already done a volcano diagram at some point and thinks they are finished with volcanoes. The diagram is the cutaway with the red channel up the middle, and it has taught a generation of children the wrong picture of what an explosive eruption looks like. This book takes that picture apart without announcing that it is doing it.
And it is a decent fit for a child who wants to be an archaeologist this month, because it puts them at the moment the evidence was made rather than the moment it was dug up.
One place to stop and talk
Stop when the sky goes dark and the rock starts falling on the roofs. One question: is this lava?
It is not, and the answer takes ten seconds, and it will stick for years because they asked it at the right moment.
What to know going in
People die here, including people your child has spent the book with, and the town does not survive. That is not a spoiler, because your child already knows how Pompeii ends, but it does mean this is not a book with a rescue in it. The narrator gets out. The place does not.
It is drawn, and drawn well, so a child who is sensitive to being frightened by pictures will get more from these panels than they would from the same scene in a paragraph: people running in the dark, the sky wrong, a family that could be separated at any moment.
The one thing I would actually plan for is what happens afterward. A child who finishes this will go looking, and what is waiting online is the casts, photographed close up, including a child and a dog. Better that they see those with you than alone on a tablet at ten at night. Sit down and look at one together and explain what plaster in a cavity means. It is the difference between a horror image and an artifact.
Where to get it
I Survived the Destruction of Pompeii, AD 79 is $14.99.
This is the one to own if ancient Rome is anywhere in your year, because it puts your child inside the day the evidence was made rather than the day it was dug back up. Buy it near the start of a Rome unit rather than the end. It works far better as the reason to go and look at Pompeii than as the reward for having finished with it.
If your child liked this one
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I Survived the California Wildfires, 2018 (I Survived Graphic Novel #13) by Lauren Tarshis
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Hurricane Katrina, 2005: Why They Could Not Leave
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Attack of the Grizzlies, 1967: Who Fed the Bears
I Survived the Attack of the Grizzlies, 1967 (I Survived #17) by Lauren Tarshis
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California Wildfires, 2018: A Fire Starts Years Early
I Survived the California Wildfires, 2018 (I Survived #20) by Lauren Tarshis
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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.
