Hurricane
by John Rocco; illus. by the author
Primary    Little, Brown    48 pp.    g
9/21    978-0-7595-5493-1    $17.99

Life is good for our young narrator. He loves to fish, crab, swim, and just watch the river passing by, and claims a little-used and neglected neighborhood dock as his own. One summer day, a hurricane hits his small community (in what looks like the Southeast wetlands). Rocco’s dramatic, naturalistic digitally colored watercolor illustrations, a mix of panels, single pages, and spreads, show the impending storm approaching and the community’s preparations of boarding up houses and taping windows. When the storm hits, the wind uproots trees, rain slices through the night sky, and floods wash cars away. The next morning dawns bright and still, and the boy rushes to his dock — which, like so much in his community, has been destroyed. After a day of helping rebuild around the neighborhood, the boy tackles the dock on his own. It’s too big a job, however, and he is unsuccessful until all his neighbors show up to help, and together they create not his dock but, in the narrator’s words, our dock, which becomes a shared gathering place. Front endpapers present a diagram of a hurricane’s formation, while the closing endpapers show a diagram of a dock’s construction. As in the author’s Blizzard (rev. 11/14), it is the human response to an extreme weather event that informs this strikingly illustrated, straightforwardly told book’s theme.

From the September/October 2021 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.