Table of Contents
STORM STORIES
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Nancy Tafuri’s The Big Storm (Simon & Schuster, 2009) is a “Very Soggy Counting Book” from 1 to 10 as more and more animals take shelter from the storm in a cave. For ages 2-5. |
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In Jamie Swenson’s rhyming Boom! Boom! Boom! (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013), an imperturbable little boy is peacefully reading in bed with his teddy bear (Fred) when – FLASH! CRASH! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! – a thunderstorm cuts loose. Soon any number of friends, beginning with a nervous puppy, are crawling into bed with him. For ages 2-6. |
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In Laura Vaccaro Seeger’s Walter Was Worried (Square Fish, 2006), the sky turns dark and a storm rolls in, with arouses a whole range of emotions: Walter was worried; Priscilla was puzzled; Shirley, shocked; and Frederick, frightened. Their feelings are literally spelled out in letters on their face, which makes for a fun interactive read. (Walter’s eyebrows, for example, are the r’s in “worried.”) For ages 4-8. |
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In Patricia Polacco’s Thunder Cake (Puffin, 1997), a little girl is frightened by an approaching thunderstorm, and her grandmother reassures her (“This is Thunder Cake baking weather, all right.”), by baking a very special cake. For ages 4-8. |
| From Food.com, see this yummy recipe for Patricia Polacco’s Thunder Cake. | |
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Arthur Geisert’s brilliantly illustrated Thunderstorm (Enchanted Lion Books, 2013) is a timeline – the text just a list of sequential times of day – of a thunderstorm, escalating to a tornado, moving in on a small Midwestern farm. For ages 4-8. |
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The heroine of Jerdine Nolan’s tall tale Thunder Rose (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007) was born on a stormy night and grew up to be a most unusual girl, capable of lifting a cow over her head, trouncing rustlers, squeezing rain out of clouds, and facing down tornados. For ages 5-8. |
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In Mary Stolz’s Storm in the Night (HarperCollins, 1990), a frightening storm has knocked out the power, so a grandfather tells his young grandson a story from when he was a boy in a storm as they sit together in the dark. Wonderful storm imagery and themes of intergenerational connection and overcoming fear. For ages 5-9. |
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In Peter and Connie Roop’s Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie (Carolrhoda Books, 1987), set in 1856 in Maine, young Abbie is left in charge of the lighthouse, her sick mother, and three younger sisters when her father, the lighthouse keeper, goes to the mainland for medicine. When a fierce storm blows up, Abbie is on her own for weeks, keeping the lights burning and caring for her family. For ages 6-9.
For another version of Abbie’s story, see Marcia Vaughn’s Abbie Against the Storm (Aladdin, 1999). |
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Bruce Hiscock’s The Big Storm (Boyds Mills Press, 2008) is the picture-book story of a landmark storm that swept across the United States in 1982, creating avalanches, tornadoes, and blizzards as it went. Readers learn about warm and cold fronts and air pressure. Illustrated with paintings and diagrams. For ages 6-10. |
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In Mary Pope Osborne’s Twister on Tuesday (Random House, 2001) – one of the popular Magic Tree House series – Jack and Annie are sent to a one-room schoolhouse on the Kansas prairie in the 1870s, and must save their classmates when a tornado moves in. For ages 6-9. |
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In Jennifer Smith’s The Storm Makers (Little, Brown, 2013) twins Ruby and Simon are having a strange summer, bedeviled with weird weather – which, it turns out, is all Simon’s fault. Simon is a Storm Maker, one of a group of powerful people capable of controlling the world’s weather. Soon opposing forces in the Makers of Storm Society, good and bad, are competing to control him, since Simon may be the most powerful Storm Maker of all time. For ages 8-12. |
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In Roland Smith’s Storm Runners (Scholastic, 2012), Chase Masters and his father John spend their time traveling the country in pursuit of violent storms. In this, the first of a storm-filled adventure series, they encounter horrific Hurricane Emily. For ages 8-12. |
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In Ivy Ruckman’s Night of the Twisters (HarperCollins, 2003), twelve-year-old Dan, his best friend Arthur, and baby brother Ryan are on their own when a fearsome tornado rips through their Nebraska town. Fictionalized, but based on a real event. For ages 8-12. |
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In Susan Vaught’s Me and Sam-Sam Handle the Apocalypse (Simon & Schuster, 2019), Jesse, on the autism spectrum, has problems: she’s bullied at school; her English teacher dad has just been arrested for stealing; and she’s trying to train her Pomeranian, Sam-Sam, to be a bomb-sniffing dog just like her heroic, deployed-overseas mom’s. Many kinds of heroism abound – and Sam-Sam comes into his own when a tornado rips through town. For ages 9-12. |