Ben's father is dead before page one, and that is the thing to know before you hand this over.
He is in Japan, where his father grew up, four months after losing him, and he does not want to be there. Then the ground moves, the house comes down around the family, and the sea gets up and takes them apart. Ben ends up alone in a country he does not know. Text adapted by Georgia Ball, art by Chris Chalk, with a nonfiction section and photographs at the back.
The science it actually teaches
There is one idea here and it is worth more than a term of ocean worksheets. It is on our Stealth Science shelf because almost nobody, adult or child, has the right picture of what a tsunami is.
Start with what it is not. Every wave your child has ever met was made by wind, and wind only pushes the top of the ocean around. That is why a wave breaks, dumps and is finished in two seconds, and why the water behind it is calm.
A tsunami is made underneath. Off that coast, one great slab of the seafloor is being forced down beneath another, and it does not slide smoothly. It sticks, for a very long time, while the strain builds. When it finally lets go the seabed lurches, and every bit of water sitting on top of it, from the seabed all the way to the surface, gets lifted at once. Not the top few metres. All of it.
Everything strange about a tsunami comes out of that one sentence. Out in deep water it is a low bump moving as fast as an airliner, and a ship can sail over it without anyone aboard noticing. As it comes into shallow water it slows down, and all the energy that was spread through kilometres of depth has nowhere left to go but up.
It also does not break and finish, because there is no end to the water behind it. It arrives and keeps arriving. The sea level rises and keeps rising for minutes, pushing up streets and across fields, which is why a tsunami takes buildings and cars with it while an ordinary wave the same height at the beach would just knock you over. Then it drains back out to sea, and it takes with it everything it picked up on the way in. For a lot of people the water going back out is the worse half.
And then the one thing on this page that could actually matter to your family one day. Sometimes the low part of the wave arrives first, and the sea empties out of the bay. Boats sit down on mud. Fish flap where there was water a minute ago. People walk out to look, because it is the strangest thing they have ever seen. That retreat is not a curiosity. It is the sea winding up, and it is a warning with minutes in it.
So is the shaking. On a coast, hard shaking is the alarm. You do not wait to be told, because the water can beat the siren.
The child it lands with
Start with the child this is wrong for. If your family has lost somebody in the last year, this book opens with a boy carrying exactly that, and it will not stay a book about the ocean. Some children want a story that has the same hole in it that they do. Some absolutely do not, and you know which one is sitting at your table.
Past that: the reader who has done plate boundaries on a diagram and cannot see why anyone cares. This is what the diagram is for. The whole thing, the stuck slab, the release, the lift, plays out at a scale a nine year old can feel.
And a child who is already worried about earthquakes can go either way with this one. Knowing the mechanism settles some children right down, because a thing with an explanation is smaller than a thing without one. For others it hands the worry a picture. That is your call and it is not a close one once you think about the child rather than the book.
One place to stop and talk
Do not stop at the wave. Stop at the water going out.
Then give your child the three signs and make them say them back: hard shaking on a coast, the sea pulling away from the shore, or a roar with no weather behind it. Any one of those means uphill or inland, on foot, now, without waiting for a siren or a phone or a grown-up to agree.
If you live anywhere the blue evacuation signs are on the road, walk your actual route this week. Not as a drill with a stopwatch, just a walk. That turns a book into something your child owns.
What to know going in
Many thousands of people died in 2011, whole towns were taken off the map, and this is recent enough that the people who lived through it are answering questions about it now, not in a history book. Anyone in your child's life with family in Japan has a personal stake in it.
Grief is on the first page and stays there. Ben's father is dead and the book does not tidy that away for the sake of the disaster. On top of it, the family is separated and a child is left alone in a country where he does not speak the language, which is the frightening part for most readers rather than the water.
The accident at the nuclear plant is a real part of what happened in 2011 and it is not something a graphic novel for grades 2 to 5 is going to carry. Your child may well go looking afterward and find it, and it is better if the first version they get is yours.
And if you live where the tsunami signs are on the road, this is not history for your family. It is a drill with a story wrapped around it. That is a good reason to read it, not a reason to skip it.
Where to get it
I Survived the Japanese Tsunami, 2011 is $12.99.
Read the back matter yourself before your child gets to it, so the questions that come afterward find you ready rather than reaching for a phone. And if you are on a coast, buy this one ahead of the other disaster titles on our shelf, because here the science your child picks up on a Tuesday afternoon is also a set of instructions.
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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.
