First off, I hope that everyone affected by the hurricane is okay.  I’ve been thinking about the East Coast all day.  I’ve gone through a few hurricanes in my life and they’re pretty scary.  My dad has done a lot of recovery work with both Hurricane Rita and Katrina.  When I went to visit him, I was shocked to see houses in the middle of marshes, churches completely torn apart.  It is all very humbling.

Coincidentally, we checked out a bunch of David Wiesner books from our library.  We seem to love most every book by him.  The first book that I read by him was The Three Pigs.  Both my son and I really enjoy this one.  We’ve checked out The Three Pigs no less than 3 times now.  We’re going to have to buy it one of these days.  I tell you, sometimes I think the public library is just a store front for Amazon…

Anyway, this review is about Hurricane, not The Three Pigs.  Hurricane is about two brothers experiencing a fairly mild hurricane.  When they wake up the next morning and go outside they discover that one of their huge elm trees has fallen down into the neighbor’s yard.  To them though, it looks like a jungle and they immediately begin climbing on the fallen tree.  In their imagination the fallen tree goes from being part of a jungle to being part of their pirate ship to being part of their spaceship, and beyond.  They come to really love their fallen tree.  However, one morning they wake up to the sound of a chainsaw and see that men are cutting up their beloved fallen tree and hauling it away.  They’re pretty upset about it but come to accept it.  It ends with another storm coming and their cat sitting in the window ledge watching the rain pouring down (and fish swimming in the background — its subtle and well done).

My son asked for me to read it to him over and over yesterday.  We’ve been talking a lot about the storm on the East Coast because we have family there.  I’m waiting to hear how everyone is doing and checking the news.

This is a wonderful book and my son spent some time repeating the phrase:  “There’s going to be a storm.  The wind’s kicking up.”  Pretty cute as he runs to the window.  I would ask him, “Really?  You think with all this blue sky and sunshine there’s going to be a storm?”  He responds with an emphatic, “Yes!”  There’s nothing to edit in this book and I’m sure anyone who reads this book at any age will appreciate it.

I highly recommend everything I’ve read by David Weisner.  He’s an amazing story teller.  It is really hard to go wrong with anything by him.

Where Obtained:  Library.

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