Wild Wave
by Rodman Philbrick
Intermediate, Middle School    Scholastic    192 pp.
8/24    9781338882315    $18.99
e-book ed.  9781339017860    $18.99

On a Saturday morning two weeks before school ends for the summer, Nick Chase is on a tour of a local animal sanctuary when an earthquake hits Cape Courage, New Jersey, and the world he knew ends. “The beach, the bay, my school, my friends, my family: vanished, wiped out, changed forever.” The ground heaves, the water in the bay empties, and a giant wall of water returns, destroying everything in its path. Nick and Jess Hardy, the volunteer tour guide and Nick’s classmate, do what you do in the face of a tsunami: run! On their flight through a ruined land, they come across Mr. and Mrs. Bumper, the high school soccer coach and their middle-school science teacher. Mr. Bumper is injured, and Mrs. Bumper is diabetic with medications running out soon, propelling Nick and Jess into a mission to save not just themselves but the Bumpers too. They trek through a devastated pine forest with menace at every footstep: sinkholes, bobcats, rattlesnakes, rats, aftershocks, and masked looters. And all the while there is the dread about their missing families. This is signature Philbrick: nonstop action, short and propulsive sentences, sympathetic protagonists to root for—all in under two hundred pages. There should be few so-called “reluctant readers” in a world where Philbrick’s books exist. A note on “Tsunamis and What to Do About Them” is appended.

From the ">September/October 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.