Hurricane
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The powerful story of a boy's fear and courage in the face of a force of nature too huge to even imagine.
Based on Hurricane Mitch's devastation of Honduras in 1998, Terry Trueman's acclaimed Hurricane is a gripping, realistic story told from the perspective of a hurricane survivor.
After hours of cowering in the dark with no lights, no warmth, and the terrible noises of the rain and wind pounding on the walls, José walks out his front door and steps into a nightmare. Everything is gone. Everything except for the desperate courage of those who survived that terrifying night.
But his nightmare has only begun as he and the few who are left in his small village dig for survivors, search for food and water, and try to start pulling their lives back together.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in a tiny village in Honduras, Trueman's (Stuck in Neutral) novel is based on Hurricane Mitch and the devastation it wrought in 1998, and informed by the author's experiences teaching in San Pedro Sula in 1981 1982. Trueman explains in an endnote that Mitch was the worst storm to hit the Caribbean in 200 years: as the 13-year-old narrator, Jos , experiences it, Mitch is cataclysmic. Striking while Jos 's father, older brother and sister are out on the road, the calamitous weather induces a mudslide that destroys all but two of the houses in the village and buries most of the residents. It falls to Jos to conquer his fear and be the man of the house. Trueman doesn't flinch from the grislier facts (in one scene, Jos leads a dig for groceries and finds the corpse of the grocer), but although he describes Jos 's thoughts and reactions he stints on the sensory details. Accordingly, readers will understand the impact of the storm, while the style and the almost miraculous happy ending may insulate them from feeling too much of it for themselves. An addendum links this novel (first published in a different form in the U.K. in 2003) with the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina. Ages 10-up.
