By Lauren Tarshis
A novel: Marcus is a boy and a slave in Pompeii who figures out the mountain is going to kill everyone, and can't get a single person to believe him.
Marcus is a boy and a slave in Pompeii, and for days the ground has been shivering in a way nobody around him will take seriously. Then he spots his father, Tata, among a shipment of gladiators brought in for the games, which means his father is set to be killed in the arena for an afternoon's entertainment. Marcus goes to get him out, and they make it. But once they're clear, Tata looks up at the mountain and understands what it is. Instead of running, the two of them turn around and walk back into Pompeii to warn people. Nobody listens, because they're slaves, and slaves don't tell Romans what to do. Then Vesuvius goes. First it's a city under falling rock, then choking ash, then the thing that actually killed Pompeii: a burning cloud pouring down the mountain faster than anyone can run. Under a hundred pages, and it never slows down.
Most volcano books for this age explain what a volcano does. This one shows what a volcano does to a whole town, with a child living through it. A lot of children go through a volcano stretch, and Pompeii tends to be the piece they hold onto hardest, and this is the book that turns it from a number into an afternoon with real people in it: a bakery, a market, a boy trying to make grown-ups listen. Tarshis is very good on the part that tends to stick, which is that Pompeii had warnings and shrugged them off, and that the one person who saw it coming had no standing to be heard. Marcus is a slave. In this book that isn't background, it's the reason nobody moves. It runs under a hundred pages and reads like a chase, so it goes down fast and stays a long time.