The Disaster Days: An Alright Book

 

For the past few weeks, I've been slowly making my way through Rebecca Behrens' The Disaster Days. I was recommended this book over the summer by someone, but I procrastinated on reading it until now. Oops. 

First, let's begin with a quick little summary of this book. The Disaster Days, set on Pelling Island (a quiet little island near Seattle) is a YA novel telling the story of Hannah, a 13 year old girl tasked with babysitting her neighbors' kids, Zoe and Oscar. Everything was business as usual until a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck the area, cutting off power, phone signal, clean water, ferry service to and between Seattle, and a whole bunch of other problems.

I'll start off with the positives of this book. The Disaster Days does an excellent job of drawing parallels between the book's setting and the danger of an actual earthquake in the Seattle region. In real life, the Cascadia subduction zone (located in the Pacific Northwest) has a 37% chance of experiencing a magnitude 7.1+ earthquake within the next 50 years. By writing a book that's set in this apocalyptic scenario, it brings attention to a very real danger that is likely to happen within our lifetimes. Behrens also did a great job of researching what happens in real-life to make the setting more accurate and detailed. For example, she included scientific details such as soil liquefaction that occur during a strong earthquake. This is definitely not a well-known phenomenon, showing that Behrens really did her research to make the setting accurate to real-life. 

But there were some things which I didn't like as much. My biggest critique is that there aren't any action scenes within this book that drives the plot forward. Sure, you could argue that The Disaster Days simply focuses more on the survival aspect, but even then I think that there were some missed opportunities that could really make it more interesting.

!!! Minor spoiler warning !!!

Towards the end of the novel, Hannah hears a bear outside of her tent digging through an empty can of beans that she had tossed outside. At first, I thought that there was going to finally be some sort of big fight. Maybe not even that, just some sort of confrontation. But instead, all we get is Hannah playing loud music to scare away the bear, and the bear doesn't even make an attempt to investigate the people and food within the tent, aside from a slight brush against the wall of the tent. Kinda lame in my opinion. I feel that Behrens could have done some sort of escape scenario where the bear smells the people and starts to dig around in the tent, and Hannah, Zoe, and Oscar would escape. Small things like this make Disaster Days feel somewhat of a slog to get through.

So would I recommend this book? Honestly, no. Its setting was very interesting, especially for a young adult novel, but I felt that its plot lacked depth, making the book somewhat boring. To the person who recommended it to me, I'm sorry for somewhat dissing your book. 

-Jayden