Storms Always End: Hurricane Heroes in Texas (Magic Tree House) by Mary Pope Osborne

Jack and were waiting for Mom to take them the baseball practice. A few raindrops spattered on the porch. "Sorry, kids! called Mom. Coach Don just emailed. No practice today. Annie smiled at Jack. "We can go to the woods... "Really? Do you think...?" he asked. "I woke up with a feeling.... Something really important is going to happen today," said Annie.

The date is September 8, the same date as the Great Galveston Hurricane, as the kids learn when they reach the magic tree house and find a book about the most deadly storm of the century which occurred on that date in 1900. The magical librarian Morgan le Fay has left a message for them on their destination: To help the people in Galveston they must learn important truths from a hero. And there is another message:

"DO NOT DELAY! SEEK HIGH GROUND NOW!"

The magic tree house rises and spins, taking them through time to come to rest in a large oak tree in the yard of a large blue house. It's breezy and rainy, but the street is bustling with people with umbrellas going about their business. Jack and Annie discover themselves dressed in old-fashioned clothes and high lace-up shoes and walk away, trying to blend in with the crowd in what seems to be a large, prosperous city. Turning a corner they spot the Lone Star Cafe and hurry inside, taking a small table beside a well-dressed elderly couple who give them friendly smiles.

Annie turned the gray-haired woman. "Excuse me. We're tourists from Pennsylvania. Where is the high ground in Galveston?" The old man pointed to the right. "We call it 'uptown.' The lowest ground is the Strand, the street beside the Gulf," he said, pointing left.

Then Jack has a frightening thought. He looks at Annie. She looks back, her eyes wide.

"Excuse me again, but do you know what is today's date?" she asked the couple. "You don't know that?" said the man. "It's September 8, 1900."

Jack and Annie thank the couple and hurry outside into the rain.

"We got here just in time... said Annie. ....for the worse disaster in U.S. history," said Jack.

Jack and Annie know what they must do. Rushing down the street toward the Strand to warn the kids gawking at the big waves, they shout to them to run for high ground, when a huge wave and ocean surge begins to flood the beach. The waters rise swiftly and Jack and Annie find themselves splashing and swimming down the main street, borne on the flood. They spot their tree house ahead in the backyard tree of the big blue house. A woman holding a baby is on the porch looking fearfully down the street. She beckons Jack and Annie inside and tells them that she's watching for her husband to come home from downtown. Jack and Annie try to warn her that she must get to higher ground, but the flood waters are already rising around them. and they flee first to the second floor, then to the attic, and finally to the roof, which breaks away and carries them, clinging to it. Jack spots a tall building in the distance--the Ursuline Academy, a school run by nuns.

"That's the safe place in our Texas book!" cried Annie. "People survived the hurricane there!"

Paddling with a broom and fence picket, Jack and Annie manage to get the woman and her baby and themselves to a window and inside, where they are welcomed by the Mother Superior, Sister Mary Joseph, helped along to a large room near the top of the building, and given blankets and dry clothes. Jack and Annie watch in awe as Sister Mary Joseph hurries about, making sure that the frightened and injured people are cared for and everyone has a place to warm up and sleep, calming them with her wise words:

"Deadly storms are terrible, but they always end. Then we start over and look at the world a little differently."

Sister Mary Joseph is indeed known as the hero of the Great Galveston Hurricane, and with her wise words, Jack and Annie know this mission is complete, in Mary Pope Osborne's Hurricane Heroes in Texas (Magic Tree House (R)) (Random House, 2018). In what is surely one of the most genuinely exciting stories in Pope's many Magic Tree House books, this one is solidly based on the history of what is still the most deadly hurricane in American history, taking 8,000 to 12,000 lives, and obliterating the then most populous and prosperous port on the Gulf of Mexico. For young readers just moving into chapter books, this one has it all--historical facts and fantasy adventures with likable main characters who definitely have the coolest tree house ever.

Cruise or Bust! Lions and Liars by Kate Beasley

Frederick Frederickson's social status is about as low as it can go. According to his classmate Joel, kids at the top are lions, and at the very bottom of the social ladder, there are the fleas on a meerkat's butt. And that's what Frederick figures he is.

Life at the bottom of the fifth grade hierarchy is no fun, but Frederick at least has the respite of the up-coming family cruise, with its chocolate fountains and gratis strawberry daiquiris to look forward to. But then, when Hurricane Hernando makes a turn southward,the cruise is canceled, and to add insult to injury, Frederick is forced to attend Joel's birthday party, where a cruel but well-aimed dodge ball transforms his nose into a bloody scarlet squash. Fed up, Frederick runs down to the river dock and jumps into Joel's dad's boat, which, it appears, is not securely tied up.

The hapless Frederick loses the paddle, tosses the anchor out without noticing it wasn't tied to the rope, and clumsily lets the motor fall off to boot. Floating rapidly downriver, Frederick is followed only by a rather large and very interested alligator who makes swimming to shore a bad idea.

After a chilly wet night trying to sleep in the boat, Frederick finds himself beached on a sandy shore. He's still wearing his bloody shirt and he hasn't eaten in at least twenty hours But his nose, still sore and bulbous, is apparently still working.

Frederick was alone at the edge of a river. He smelled pancakes and coffee and then heard a man's angry voice crackle through a loudspeaker: "Move it, maggots! Pick up your name tag and report to the welcome meeting ASAP!"

Frederick's legs had cramped, he had a crick in his neck, and he had pulled something in his shoulder. But none of that mattered, because he smelled pancakes!

He limps toward the scent of food, where kind volunteer Miss Betty hands him a sausage wrapped in the world's best pancake. Restored, Frederick picks up the last nametag left on the Welcome Table, bearing the name DASHIELL BLACKWOOD. Portentously, he sees that his new alter ego, Dashiell, has been assigned to Group 13. Miss Betty beams at him, still surrounded in the mesmerizing aura of pancakes.

"Welcome to Camp Omigoshee," she gushed. "Where boys are transformed!"

If anybody ever yearned for a transformation, it's Frederick, and he accepts the identity of no-show Dashiell, decides to go along with the camp thing, and is shown to join his bunkmates, a motley group with odd nicknames--The Professor, Nosebleed, Specs, and Ant Bite--all for good reason, as he soon finds out. Frederick scarcely has time to consider their strange names when the kid in line in front of him turns around to look at his nametag.

His plate toppled. He looked up at Frederick again.

"You're Dash?" the boy asked in a tone of wonder. A hush fell among the boys closest to Frederick.

Whoever the absent Dashiell Blackwood is, he is clearly a lion in the middle-school pecking order, and Frederick decides to go with his deception, at least until after breakfast and until he can find a phone to call home. Not knowing what else to do, he tries to live up to the expectations of the other campers. Having a mega-cool rep seems to work, even when Frederick almost fails at rope climbing. His gung-ho counselor Benjamin assures him that "he's still in the fear stage of transformation," and suddenly it dawns on Frederick that this is no ordinary camp. It's a disciplinary camp where there are some real bad boys, and he's stuck portraying the persona of the baddest Bad Dude of them all, Dashiell Blackwood, a legend in his own time. Frederick's only hope is to get to a land phone and call home for a rescue, and his bunkmates loyally agree to join him in what they think is a candy-raiding midnight break-in of the camp office.

As if assuming an unwonted personality isn't anxiety-provoking enough, Hurricane Hernando takes a turn toward Camp Omigoshee, and the camp has to be evacuated. Frederick is left stranded when he goes back for little Ant Bite in the flooding mess hall, while outside a real lion loose from the Jacksonville Zoo is roaming the woods. During the night the storm surge forces them out and ironically into the same boat that brought Frederick there in the first place.

It looks like fate has taken a hand in his transformation after all, in Kate Beasley's poignant and hilarious Lions and Liars (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). With some of the secrets of real friendship learned and a consolation cruise complete with a chocolate fountain for Group 13, not to mention a cameo pirate appearance for the real Dashiell Blackwood, Frederick Frederickson finally realizes that he has no fear of the social lions in his future.

Caldecott artist Dan Santat's full-page black and white illustrations are inspired, bringing Camp Omigoshee to comic life, and the story is both empathetic and terrifically funny. Says the The Wall Street Journal's reviewer, "Ms. Beasley does something admirable with her food-chain metaphor. A bit like Chekhov's gun, the metaphorical lion from the first act turns into a real one, adding a moment of unexpected bite. Otherwise tender at heart and laugh-out-loud entertaining, the tale of Frederick's misadventures... will charm readers ages 8-12." Kirkus Reviews adds succinctly, "A fun coming-of-age romp!"

Home Alone: The Magic Trap (The Lemonade War Series) by Jacqueline Davies

illusion (n) something that seems to be one thing when it is really another; a magic trick

It was a sound like an explosion that yanked Evan back awake. The sound was so loud, it even woke Jessie, who could sleep through an army invasion. "What was that?" she shouted, looking at Evan with wild eyes.

Evan and Jessie hurried out of their mother's room and followed the noise of the storm. When they got to Jessie's bedroom, they couldn't believe their eyes. A large tree limb was sticking right through the wall and lay on Jessie's bed.

Evan looked at Jessie, expecting her to flip out, but her face was very still. "If I'd slept there, I'd be dead." she said, like a reporter stating a fact.

When Jessie and Evan's war reporter now-you-see-him-now-you-don't dad turns up for first time in a year, their Mom reluctantly agrees to take him up on his offer to stay with the kids while she flies to the West Coast for an important business conference. The friend she'd recruited has just been taken to the hospital, the expensive flights are booked, and an important commission is riding on her making the trip.

Dad smiles and says, " I'll do it. I'm their dad!" and despite Evan and Jessie's distrust of their elusive parent, at first Dad is great. He makes pancakes, he agrees to help Evan build a disappearing rabbit box for his upcoming neighborhood magic show and even buys a white rabbit they name Professor Hoffman, although he absentmindedly leaves him in the car trunk for hours. Dad takes down the rotten railings around their back porch, declaring them an accident waiting to happen, transforms the rickety porch into a stage with red velvet curtains, and even orders a wicker disappearing box from India for the grand finale. When he cuts a hole in the porch floor for Jessie to make her secret escape from the box, he blithely announces he's calling a contractor to replace the whole deck.

But the next morning, up early, Jessie finds a note in the kitchen and runs upstairs to wake Evan, with the news that their father's super-dad act has been itself an illusion, ending in a disappearing act of his own:

HEY, KIDDOS!
HAD TO LEAVE EARLY BECAUSE OF THE STORM.  MOM WILL BE HOME SOON. KNOCK 'EM DEAD AT THE SHOW.
LOVE,
YOUR DEAR OLD DAD

There's a war on somewhere, and he has to be there. After all, "I'm the Best!" he's told Evan, with his charming grin. Evan and Jessie decide it is better not to tell their mom that Dad has left them alone until she gets back the next day. But when Jessie goes downstairs to watch cartoons, she finds another surprise worth getting Evan up for.

"It's on all the channels! The storm is coming! Here! It's not tracking to the west. It's heading straight for us! It's not a tropical storm anymore. It's a hurricane!"

Evan intuits that it's better not to tell the neighbors that they have been left alone by their father, and he knows Mom's flight won't be landing in a hurricane and that he and Jessie are on their own. "Stay calm and carry on!" Evan tells the panicked Jessie, using Mom's favorite World War II slogan, and carry on they do, in Jacqueline Davies' latest-in-series, The Magic Trap (The Lemonade War Series) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014). The two very different siblings carry on together, playing to their strengths--Jessie coming up with her emergency supply list and Evan capably nailing up tarps and putting out buckets to catch the leaks, even hauling Jessie out of the flooded basement where she has gone to try to rescue the missing rabbit. And when the storm passes, Evan calmly comes up with a perfect performance for his rescheduled show, wowing the crowd with his card tricks, while in the best show-must-go-on tradition, Jessie overcomes her claustrophobia inside the disappearing box to vanish and reappear for the finale with a flourish in the audience--with the just-found Professor Hoffman in her arms.

Again author Davies uses her contrasting characters to build a suspenseful story of a brother and sister depending on each other with humor and insight, dealing with both the storm without and the storm within as they try to understand their driven dad's motivation that left them alone in a hurricane. As they try to resolve their "family first" mom and their "just-have-to-be-there" dad, Evan and Jessie instinctively work out a blend of their own abilities that get them through it together.

All the qualities that have made The Lemonade War an exemplary realistic fiction series for middle readers are present here--sibling rivalry, Evan's capable social and athletic skills set against his lackluster academic skills, Jessie's compulsive mastery of numerical skills and her total inability to interpret human behavior, and family problems that would disintegrate most families--along with pitch-perfect kid dialog and insight into elementary school relationships that make these books so notable. The author even shows off her extraordinary writer's chops in her chapter headings--all definitions of magic trick terms that also highlight the premise of each section.  And in this fifth book Davies shows that rare ability of the best of children's authors, to create plots in which their characters grow and change in a way completely true to themselves. Beverly Cleary had that ability, and it is with all reverence that I can say Jacqueline Davies has it, too, in the manner of Evan's best card trick, in spades.

While each book stands alone brilliantly, this series is at its best read in order. Previous books are The Lemonade War (The Lemonade War Series), The Lemonade Crime (The Lemonade War Series), The Bell Bandit (The Lemonade War Series), and The Candy Smash (The Lemonade War Series).