By Lauren Tarshis
Leo is eleven and orphaned, scraping by selling newspapers, when at twelve past five one morning the city falls down around him and then burns for three days.
Leo Vetrelli is eleven and on his own in San Francisco. His father is dead, he sells newspapers, and he keeps a gold nugget in his pocket that his grandfather gave him. He pats it when he's scared, which is often. Word gets around that he has it, and two street boys, Fletch and Wilkie, jump him and take it. So Leo cooks up a plan to win it back: dress as the neighborhood ghost and frighten them into handing it over. The plan turns into a four-way brawl inside a building, and then the building starts to move, because it's April 18, 1906, and the fight is suddenly over. The earthquake comes first, and then the far worse thing, the fires that burned for three days and finished what the shaking started. Leo and a boy named Morris dig Wilkie out from under a fallen chimney. Later Leo and Wilkie go into a burning building after Morris with a wet blanket over their heads. Sixteen short chapters, and Tarshis ends most of them on a drop.
Your child may have been collecting earthquake facts from the photograph books; this is the one that makes those facts mean something. A death toll on a page is just a number until it belongs to a boy with a name, and this book drops your child into the city at the second it comes apart and makes them care whether Leo lives. Tarshis writes short and fast and hangs a hook off nearly every chapter, so a child who stalls on chapter books can finish it in a couple of nights and want the next one. And she does the thing that earns the whole series its place: Leo and the other boys are poor and hungry and alone before the ground ever moves, so your child comes out understanding that the disaster landed hardest on the people who already had the least.