Flood Friday

Title: Flood Friday
Author: Lois Lenski
Major Themes: Connecticut, Floods, Natural Disasters
Synopsis: When a flood washes away most of the houses in their neighborhood, the children in a town in western Connecticut get to see how a community can pull together for everyone’s good.

My 11-year-old is in love with Lois Lenski’s books right now. He has asked me to read aloud every one that he has been able to get his hands on. We just finished Flood Friday, a story about a terrible flood that devastated Connecticut in 1955.

Sally and her friends are having a normal day, despite the rain that keeps pouring down and hasn’t stopped for several days. They go to the store for ice cream, then go home to Sally’s house, where they look at the raging river and the things that are being carried downstream with it. The children go to bed as usual—but during the night Sally’s parents wake her up and the family must escape through an upstairs window. Together with many other refugees, they take shelter in a school on high ground.

After a couple of days in the school, and a typhoid shot that leaves Sally sick, the family is able to go to the Boyd’s house to stay. Times are hard, with no water or electric, but everyone pulls together. Will Sally’s family have a home to return to, or has theirs been carried away by the floodwaters like so many others?

We loved the story of the community pulling together and helping each other. The children in the story learned what was most important—not their belongings, but each other. This is a great picture of a community pulling together to recover.

WARNING: The word gee is used many times: Chapter 1 page 2, chapter 2, page 20, chapter 4, pages 38 and 43, chapter 6, pages 64, 65 and 69, chapter 7 pages 73 and 77. The word heck is in chapter 7, page 84. Otherwise, it’s a clean book.

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