This one is different from the rest of the shelf in a way that has nothing to do with how it is written. It happened in May 2011, in a real town in Missouri, and the people it happened to are still there.
The story is Dex, eleven, who has always wanted to see a tornado. He gets a ride-along with a famous television storm chaser called Dr. Norman Rays, whose show he used to watch with his older brother Jeremy before Jeremy joined the Navy. The storm they are watching is not heading for Joplin. Then it turns. It is book twelve, about a hundred pages.
The chaser and the television show are invented. The tornado is not.
The science it actually teaches
Most tornado books teach how a tornado forms. This one cannot, because Dex is eleven and standing in the wrong place to be taught anything. What it can teach, and what makes it worth owning, is the warning system, which is the part of tornado science an adult in a car actually uses.
Start with the two words nearly everybody has muddled. A watch means the air over a large region could produce tornadoes today, so pay attention and know where you would go. A warning means one is happening now, or radar is showing rotation right now over your specific county, so go. A watch may run for six hours over four states. A warning is minutes, and it is about you.
Where a warning comes from is worth saying out loud, because it is not somebody seeing a funnel. Doppler radar does not see shape, it sees motion. It sees a patch of storm moving away from the radar sitting directly beside a patch moving toward it, and that pairing is rotation. A forecaster reading that couplet can call a tornado that nobody has laid eyes on.
Which matters in Joplin more than almost anywhere, because that tornado was wrapped in rain. You could not see it. And the ordinary human response to a siren is to go outside and look for confirmation before acting, which is a reasonable habit that works most of the time and did not work that day. The people waiting to see it were still waiting.
Then the hard idea, and it is the one worth the price of the book. Lead time is not safety. A warning does not protect anybody. It converts into safety only if a decision has already been made about where the family goes, and if that decision is being made during the siren, the minutes are already spent. That is why a house with a plan and a house without one get very different outcomes from the identical warning.
Last one, quick, because children like it. The strength scale rates a tornado by the damage it left, not by a measured wind speed, because an instrument is almost never inside one. Joplin was rated at the top of that scale. The rating is a description of what was found afterwards.
If what your child actually wants is how a tornado gets made, the other tornado book on our shelf is The Tornado Scientist, and it does that job properly with real radar and a real researcher. This one is not trying to.
The child it lands with
If you are in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma or Arkansas, your child has already stood in a hallway with their hands over their neck, and this book lands on ground that is already prepared. That is an argument for it and an argument against it and only you know which.
The child who watches the sky and likes it. The one who asks what the clouds are doing. This gives them the vocabulary and one honest lesson about a siren.
The reluctant reader who wants something with a real event behind it and will not sit still for nonfiction.
And plainly, the child who already lies awake through a thunderstorm should not be handed this one this year. It will not toughen them up. It will give the fear a shape and a name.
One place to stop and talk
Stop at the first siren in the book and do not start again until the two of you have walked to the place you would actually go. Not named it. Walked to it, from wherever you happen to be sitting.
Then time it.
That number, in seconds, is the only part of this book your child may one day need.
What to know going in
This is the one on the shelf that needs the most care, and none of the reasons are about the writing.
It is living memory. May 2011 is not history to anybody over about twenty, more than a hundred and fifty people were killed, and a large piece of a city was taken off the map in a few minutes. Children were among the dead. A high school graduation had finished that afternoon. A hospital was hit. Your child may well end up in a room with somebody who was there, and this book will be part of what they think they know about it.
The deaths are not hidden in the story. Tarshis writes injury and loss for grade-two readers carefully and without lingering, but carefully is not the same as gently, and a hundred pages with a boy on the cover is easy to hand over without thinking.
The real difference between this book and the rest of the disaster shelf is that this one can happen where your child lives, this spring, at an hour they will be awake for. Pompeii cannot. The plague cannot. A child who reads about a volcano in Iceland closes the book. A child in tornado country closes this one and then hears a siren tested on the first Wednesday of the month.
That is not an argument against the book. It is an argument against handing it over and leaving the room.
One more thing, and it belongs in the caution rather than anywhere else. The storm-chasing setup is invented and it is glamorous. A child who finishes this thinking that driving toward a storm to see it is the exciting choice has learned the exact opposite of what the day teaches. Say something.
Where to get it
It is $5.99 at I Survived the Joplin Tornado, 2011, an older printing at an older price, and it needs none of the eleven books in front of it.
Buy it if you are going to be in the room while it is read. Do not buy it as a car book or a bedtime book, which is exactly the size and shape it looks like from the outside.
And when your child asks afterwards whether it could happen here, and they will, answer the real question with the real answer for where you actually live. They are going to get an answer from somebody. Yours is better.
The rest of the shelf is under Stealth Science, and most of it is gentler than this.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
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
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
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
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.
