Dogs and All

I am not a big dog fan.  I am not anti-dog, it's just that I am a much more a cat person and dogs do scare me.  Now I know this book was about MUCH more than dogs.  But the only reason why I didn't love this as much as the other books I have read by her.  Ward won the National Book Award for Salvage the Bones and it is one of those cases were an award committee gets it right!  It is set during Hurricane Katrina in Ward's fictional Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage on the Gulf Coast. 

What I Loved

about The Ninth Ward was that it wasn't just a book about Hurricane Katrina. This was a book about a person who happened to be involved in Hurricane Katrina.  A lot of times books about an "event" have a main character, but the main character doesn't seem to have existed before the "event" and we can't surely know how the main character will continue to live after the "event" because all we know about him or her is what she or he was like during the "event."  Jewell Parker Rhodes characters in both Towers Falling and in Ninth Ward have lives before and we learn about them and we seem to get an understanding of how they will continue on after the book/"event" ends.  That seems like it would be a tricky thing to do.  But wow, Jewell Parker Rhodes just has that ability to make me care so much about Deja and Lenesha and I am so glad I got to "know" them as people.
AND this is totally cool- I just wrote to her because I found out she is from Pittsburgh!  Can you believe it!  And she wrote me back!  Even though she was on a plane headed to New York.  Totally cool!  She is from Manchester, where I met the Robinsons when I was in seminary school.  So like a big dork, I asked her if she knew them!  Dork!
I am off on a tangent.
Anyway...a great book, a must-read.  And now I will be listening to Sugar and Bayou Magic!

Not just another Katrina story

Upside Down in the Middle of Nowhere came out in the same year as Zane and the Hurricane.  Both are about Hurricane Katrina and both are exceptional.  Again, it has been a very, very good year for middle grade books, IMHO.

Newbery Potential?

Wow.  Zane and the Hurricane was phenomenal!   I loved this book so much.  It made me cry and hope and it made me angry and made me more aware. Incredible. Again, this is one of those books that should be read by adults as well.  Just such an fantastic historical fiction book.  Zane is a neat, neat, neat character.  A 12-year-old from New Hampshire who goes to New Orleans to meet his great grandmother (grandma or great, I can't remember) and while he is there he is separated from her and Hurricane Katrina hits.
There is a lot of misery in this book.  It is a dark story about a horrible disaster that brought out the worst in humanity and the best in humanity.  It asks some great questions.  Why did some people act one way and others the opposite?
The supporting characters in the book are wonderful, too.  Young Malvina is a brave, brave girl.  I wish Tru had been my grandpa growing up. Miss Trissy would have been a wonderful grandma.  I love the description Zane gives of her singing.
Here is the Sunday NY Times book review.  Excellent.

Disaster!

Back in my days in the south, Bethel Park, PA, my buddy Rachel and I would run around having disasters very often.  "I'm having a disaster!" could be heard nearly every day.  Now of course, we were a bit dramatic.  There is no need for Lauren Tarshis to write an I Survived the 1990s in Bethel Park.  Bethel Park was a wonderful place in which to work, shop, eat, learn, karaoke and have adventures.

The disasters written about in The Unthinkable:  Who Survives When Disaster Strikes- and Why are the serious, horrible disasters.  The man-made and the natural disasters.  I read this one because I really enjoyed Amanda Ripley's The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way. 

This was a very quick read, even though it is hard to hear about horrible tragedies such as Hurricane Katrina and September 11.  It was fascinating to read about Rick Rescorla, a true hero of a man who made it possible for nearly all of Morgan Stanley's 2,687 employees to evacuate the tower by putting into place advanced evacuation plans and by keeping a cool head during the attack.    There have been studies done, physiologcial and psychological, to determine if survivors have something extra or something less which makes them able to survive disasters while others perish.  Interesting stuff here. 

When the Saints Go Marching In

I've never been to New Orleans but I've always wanted to go. Something about the voodoo and the coffins being above ground and the 'ghostly' atmosphere- with all those vines and bayous attracts me. Also being that Eve's Bayou is one of my most favorite movies and I LOVED Skeleton Key, I want to go there even more. Hurricane Katrina was an indescribable horror. A terrible tragedy tragedy that changed New Orleans forever, I am sure. I remember when Mom and I drove to Atlantic City for a conference we listened to the Anderson Cooper memoir and the talked about the hurricane. And it was like learning about it from someone who was there. His book is awesome to listen to by the way. He reads it himself. So when I saw Hurricane Song on the self at the library I was like Hooray! and I read it in a couple hours. I don't think i've ever done that before! It is an incredibley interesting story of Miles, a high school sophomore and his jazz musician dad and uncle, trapped in the Superdome during the hell that was Katrina. Excellent book. I recommend it highly.