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Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina & New Orleans
by Don Brown; illus. by the author
Intermediate, Middle School Houghton 96 pp.
8/15 978-0-544-15777-4 $18.99
To date, the majority of children’s and young adult books about Hurricane Katrina are microcosmic stories or accounts of a single person or family. Here, in powerful comic-book format, Brown delivers the full force of the storm and its impact on the city as a whole. Beginning with Katrina’s inception as just a breeze in Africa, he traces its path across the Atlantic and into the Gulf of Mexico. Evacuation procedures in New Orleans, both successful (eighty percent of the residents left) and unsuccessful (promised buses for the poor never arrived), are outlined in chilling detail as readers see residents gridlocked in traffic and also see the resignation of those remaining. When the storm hits New Orleans, Brown hits readers with the consequences: flooding, fear, frustration, desperation, and death. He follows with the overwhelming numbers: broken levees releasing one million gallons of water a minute; twenty-five thousand people taking refuge in the Superdome (and fifteen thousand in the convention center) without adequate food, water, or toilets; ten thousand rescues by the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and 33,500 rescues by the Coast Guard; plus floodwaters teeming with snakes, refuse, oil, and dead bodies. Hovering above all is the lack of coordinated help from myriad governmental agencies. Captioned with meticulously documented facts and quotes from victims, the art records these events, as it portrays people being saved or drowning, or a baby hoisted in the air above the rising waters, its fate unknown. While commanding, these images are not sensationalized. If a book’s power were measured like a storm’s, this would be a category five. Appended with source notes and a bibliography.
From the September/October 2015 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.
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