TSUNAMI

A peaceful idyll on the Alaskan coast turns literally topsy-turvy for resourceful young Scout and her skunk companion.

As in the previous book, the storyline serves as a base for an instructional manual on the causes of a natural disaster and best practices for surviving it. Though Scout is temporarily separated from her scientist mom when successive earthquake shocks leave the cabin in ruins and presage an oncoming tsunami, she’s well prepared—both with knowledge of proper gear and procedures and with pithy but specific background lectures to her furry foil on relevant topics from plate tectonics and seismology to tsunami formation and characteristics. Young readers will easily absorb both thanks to the nicely balanced mixes of discourse, bantering dialogue, and simply designed and drawn cartoon scenes and schematics. Along with useful and enlightening details such as the recommended contents of a go-bag, how earthquakes are classified these days (not by the Richter scale), and the various causes of tsunamis besides earthquakes, the message that such large-scale phenomena are genuinely dangerous and need quick, smart action to survive comes through loud and clear. Scout returns in an appendix to remind readers about essential emergency supplies and guidelines and to offer a set of tsunami information sources. She and her mom present as white.

Informative and suspenseful.