By Roland Smith
A short, fast survival novel: a Category 5 hurricane flips the school bus into a lake, and three children have to get themselves through the storm with no adults left to help them.
Chase Masters and his dad are storm runners. They drive toward the hurricanes everyone else is fleeing, so they can help once the worst has passed. That means Chase knows more about storms than anyone at his new school in Florida, which is where he is the morning a Category 5 comes ashore. The bus is racing to get the children home ahead of it when the wind flips it off the road and into a lake. Chase pulls the others out, and with Nicole and Rashawn he sets off on foot across flooded, broken country toward a farm where they think they'll be safe. Standing between them and the farm are hurricane wind, water that's still rising, an alligator loose in the flood, and a leopard that got out of a circus truck the storm tore apart. The chapters are short and the pages go fast, and the storm your child has read about in nonfiction is here as the real thing.
Roland Smith writes short, driving chapters at a reading level that sits well below the age this is aimed at, which is the whole reason it works for a nine-to-twelve-year-old who loves storms but stalls out on thick books. A child who has soaked up how a hurricane forms, what the eye is, what the surge does, finally gets to be inside one, with no grown-up in charge and everything they've learned mattering at once. It reads fast enough that a reluctant reader can finish it and feel like they finished a real novel, because they did.