Out of the Fires
A Journal of Resilience and Recovery After Disaster
Colleen Larmour author Carrie Lara author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:American Psychological Association
Published:4th Jul '23
£15.99
Supplier delay - available to order, but may take longer than usual.
After a fire destroys his home and neighborhood, a young boy must learn what it means to be resilient and to recover.
Let me tell you about that one day everything was there, and then there was nothing.
This inspiring journal will help victims of a natural disaster as they follow a boy who is healing after a devastating fire in his neighborhood. A journal filled with drawings, news clippings, and coping strategies, this book is chock full of information on cultivating resilience after a natural disaster. Things may never be “normal” again, but he discovers that he is resilient and strong—even when hard things happen. Includes end matter on the topic of building resilience.
The aftermath of a natural disaster becomes an educational narrative.
Narrated by a boy coming back to school following a wildfire that canceled classes for two weeks, this book is intended to help young people grappling with similar events. The first section deals with the return to school in paragraphs broken up by related, colored pencil–esque images. The boy learns strategies for dealing with trauma (writing, drawing, taking deep breaths). It’s not until the second section that readers discover exactly what happened, though the author’s introduction details the 2017 California wildfires that inspired the book. This section describes the fire and the boy and his family’s evacuation, giving readers a child’s-eye view that, amid the chaos, grounds itself in people’s kindness. The narrator’s reaction to the fire evolves over time; sometimes he feels angry, other times sad and lost. Moments of frustration are conveyed, too: “My emotions exploded,” he says, alongside an image of a mushroom cloud. However, seeing his friends again makes him feel happy; the child’s emotional journey will reassure both young people and adults. Interspersed news clippings describe what is happening in the community at large, though the narrator mostly focuses on his personal journey. At the end, however, he discusses worldwide disasters, and he and his classmates send encouraging messages to kids in Australia, where wildfires also raged.
-- KiISBN: 9781433840692
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
64 pages