Eye of the Storm

I am SO GLAD that I picked up Kate Messner's Eye of the Storm to read this week.  I loved everything about it.  If you are looking for a fast-paced, action-packed book, this is definitely for you!

In Eye of the Storm, the future is filled with wild weather.  Hurricanes have taken out much of Florida and people all around the country live in fear of monster tornadoes.  There are storm shelters along the sides of the highway and at every home, people don't gather in public anymore, and everyone carries around a DataSlate so they can get weather alerts.  Jaden Meggs is going to spend the summer in Oklahoma with her father.  She hasn't spent much time with him since he re-married and had a new baby.  Oklahoma is located right in Tornado Alley.  But Jaden's father, a prominent scientist, has created a new community...a "StormSafe" community.  Jaden will finally be able to ride her bike and play with her friends because the storms cannot reach her here.  At first, she is wary.  Wary of riding her bike far from home, wary of the new kids she meets, wary of her father.  As she learns more and more about this place, and about her father, she realizes that things are not what they seem.  She and her new friends Risha and Alex uncover a dark side to all of this new technology and have to work fast to save everything that is important to them.

As I was reading this book, all I could think about was the amount of scientific research that Kate Messner had to do in order to write this book.  Even though it is a chapter book, I think it would be a great model for showing kids how to incorporate their knowledge of a topic into fiction writing.  I can't wait for her next book Wake Up Missing to come out later this summer!