3 stars
Hooray for the first girl lead in the series! Tarshis does address this in the backmatter but…
Personally I wish Tarshis would stop hanging onto the explanation that she wanted to write books her sons would read and they weren’t interested in girl characters. I hate this excuse. Can we all just admit we need a variety of characters of all gender identities? Using that excuse just perpetuates the idea that boys should only want to read books with boy characters or those written by men (and historically we’ve already got a lot of those). With that rational, girls (and anyone else who isn’t a white, non-disabled boy) should put up with not seeing themselves represented for the sake of the interests of (predominately white, non-disabled) boys.
Read it all. Read everything. People like you, people different from you, and everything in between. Special thanks to Amelia, Chloe, Maya, Charlotte, Mariella, Matty, Ali, Elena, and all the other girls who kept insisting we needed girl leads in this series. End rant.
As far as the story goes, this one was pretty good. Jessie can, of course, only be the lead as long as her friends are boys, which has also been the case for the other girl leads. Boys can be friends with boys, but in this universe, girls can only exist as long as their numbers equal or are exceeded by boys (i.e. Carmen has Tony in I Survived The Great Molasses Flood, 1919, Mel has her brother Kevin in I Survived the Attack of the Grizzlies, 1967). Eye roll, but I digress.
There is a decent amount of action in this one. I was more interested in the Skeleton Woman (completely fictional) plotline, which distracted me slightly from the actual story. I was a bit disappointed it wasn’t based on a real legend in the area because it was a cool addition. There is quite a bit of action as things heat up around St. Helens with some interesting survival details.
This one appears to have less information in the backmatter in comparison to others in the series. It includes a Q&A about the eruption of St. Helens, volcanology, dangerous volcanoes around the world, and further reading suggestions.
Overall, it was good and could be used to teach about volcanic eruptions. The explanations of the dangers of eruptions (avalanches, ash/smoke clouds, pyroclastic flow) that were worked into the story were especially interesting.