Disaster Lit Suggestions?

June 10, 2008 3:34 PM

Can you recommend any great fiction or poetry about natural disasters?

You'd think this would be easy... I'm looking for great YA literature appropriate for 7th graders, on the topic natural disasters. This is what I've come up with so far:
The Wizard of Oz
Out of the Dust (Karen Hesse)
The Cay, Theodore Taylor

Anyone fondly recall a great YA book about natural disaster survival, especially one that is really exciting? We don't want anything that is too young and babyish though. The book/story/poem needs to be fictional--there are of course many memoirs and nonfiction books that I'm already aware of.

Thanks for any ideas. Bonus points for anything that has won awards or is by a famous author.

posted by tk to writing & language (10 answers total)

A High Wind in Jamaica
posted by TheRaven at 4:12 PM on June 10, 2008

After the Quake by Haruki Murakami.
posted by mochilove at 4:30 PM on June 10, 2008

Housekeeping. Also, A High Wind in Jamaica is really excellent.
posted by OmieWise at 4:41 PM on June 10, 2008

Faulkner's novella "Old Man" from If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, features the great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

Also, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God has a chapter on the Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928.
posted by saladin at 5:23 PM on June 10, 2008

The Twenty-One Balloons too juvenile?
posted by Rash at 5:28 PM on June 10, 2008

Does Grapes of Wrath count?
posted by salvia at 5:37 PM on June 10, 2008

The filed-under-YA novels Life as We Knew It and the dead and the gone are about an asteroid knocking the moon out of orbit...the results are as close as you can get to apocalyptic without going over. They're more survivalist than suspense, and the second book is definitely more grim than the first. I'd have devoured them when I was 13.
posted by gnomeloaf at 5:54 PM on June 10, 2008

Leopardi's "The Wild Broom": a flowering shrub growing on the slopes of Mt. Vesuvius.
posted by steef at 6:25 PM on June 10, 2008

"The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" by Gordon Lightfoot. If you believe that songs are poems...
posted by gjc at 8:27 PM on June 10, 2008

Siberia by Ann Hallam and Exodus by Julie Bertagna are both post-global warming YA disaster novels.

Does nuclear war count as a natural disaster? There are several good YA novels on that topic.

The disaster in How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff is not natural either but shares the same qualities.
posted by ninebelow at 8:39 AM on June 12, 2008