Children's Book Review: I Survived the California Wildfires, 2018 (I Survived #20) by Lauren Tarshis

By Jennifer Hancock | Central Library

The I Survived series is so very popular among tweens and teens. My nephew suggested I review one of these books, and I remembered all the kids in our Youth Department carrying them around and reading them. And unlike other series, the books of this series are unrelated except for the fact that they are all about disasters; no common characters or even time periods; you can pick up any one without having read the previous ones and you will miss nothing. So I picked up the latest one and started reading, and for just a few moments, I wondered if I was reading a current news article instead of a fiction story. After all, the horrible fires in California are all over the news!

But no, I Survived the California Wildfires, 2018 (I Survived #20) by Lauren Tarshis is set in Northern California in 2018 in a small community north of San Francisco, where 11-year-old Josh and his mother are visiting family. It is a very different world from his hometown in New Jersey, and John is struggling with some issues from back home, so he seems to find this place (with no Wi-Fi or cell service) relaxing, until he and his cousin are trapped in the middle of a fast-moving wildfire. The wildfire will soon be called the Camp Fire by Cal Fire (California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection,) and will cover 153,336 acres of land; will destroy 18,804 buildings including the entire town of Paradise, California; will kill 85 civilians along with 12 injured and one missing; and injure five firefighters. Because of the high death toll, the Camp Fire is considered the costliest wildfire in history, even though the Mendocino Complex fire earlier in the year covered 459,123 acres of land, destroyed 280 buildings, and killed a firefighter while injuring four others. It was a truly devastating year of wildfires in California.

One of the best parts of the I Survived series is the “additional information about” section in the back of each book, giving more information about the topics discussed in the story and listing additional resources to learn more! Some of the stories Tarshis tells deal with events I never even knew happened, such as the Great Molasses Flood of 1919, the Children’s Blizzard in 1888, or the Attack of the Grizzlies in 1967, and I love learning more about these pieces of history that have been almost forgotten. Then again, she also writes about things I did learn in school, such as D-Day 1944 and the American Revolution in 1776, and it is sometimes shocking to learn how little I know about things I thought I knew pretty well. Tarshis does a great deal of research into all of her books so she can create stories with a solid grounding in fact.

So, I wondered how the 2020 wildfires compare to the 2018 wildfires. After all, 2018 was the worst year of wildfires in recorded history, right? Well, not anymore. . . . During the month of August 2020, Cal Fire saw the starts of not one, not two, but THREE of the top five largest wildfires in recorded history. The largest, the August Complex (which covers much of the same ground as the Mendocino Complex), has so far burned 877,477 acres of land, although only 14 buildings have been destroyed so far; not surprising since they haven’t been able to rebuild very many of those buildings since 2018. The second largest was the Mendocino Complex in 2018. Third and fourth largest were started by massive numbers of lightning strikes in a thunderstorm, so are called the SCU Lightning Complex (396,624 acres) and the LNU Lightning Complex (363,220 acres) and have destroyed almost 2,000 structures. And the fifth largest started in December of 2017 is called the Thomas fire, and it killed 23 three people, though only two of those were directly from the fire; the other 21 deaths were from mudslides created by the loss of vegetation just before the rainy season started, causing floods and mudflows that destroyed over 100 homes. It’s hard to imagine how difficult it must be to pick up the pieces of your life and move on after all of this.