A massive earthquake forces Amy and her estranged half-sister to work together to survive.
Amy is happy it’s the last day of school...until a huge earthquake hits. She’s surprised that it’s Mara, her half-sister, who finally comes for her, since they hardly know each other. There’s no word from any of their parents, and their homes have been destroyed. So Amy and Mara set out on a perilous journey from their suburb into the city to search for their parents. As they walk day and night, the scope of the horrific destruction becomes clear. Have their parents survived the disaster?
HiLo books are a relatively new phenomenon - I certainly don't remember them being available when I was in school, which is
less than twenty years (::recounts, sighs::) a little over twenty years. They're becoming an indispensable part of the fabric of reading, though, with
Barrington Stoke in the UK and
Orca in the US among the publishers turning out high quality reads.
This particular HiLo concerns an earthquake that hits when our young heroine is in school. Naturally frightened and worried, she's surprised when her estranged half sister comes to collect her instead of her father. Without parents, the two try to navigate the immediate aftermath of the disaster and find a safe place to stay.
Things are a little lighter than many books that tackle this kind of topic - two teenage girls traveling alone are heckled exactly once and they're able to just walk away - but it doesn't shy away from the dark side of this kind of disaster, either. Amy's mother is out of the country when the earthquake hits, so her biggest problem is finding a way home when all planes and travel are stopped; but the girls' father is missing, presumed dead when the section of downtown he works in collapses, and the girls see plenty of other dead people as they travel. However, there is also a focus on how people can help each other; one man is cooking the entire contents of his freezer before it goes bad and passing it out to everyone, another has a working satellite phone and insists people use it, and everywhere the girls go people watch out for them and help them. It's the best and worst of humanity all at once, and a warning that this could happen to any of us at any time.
This is fast paced and exciting and kids will definitely want to keep reading to find out how things end up.
Aftershock publishes on the 15th August, 2023. I received a free copy and am giving an honest review.
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