I Survived the Hindenburg Disaster, 1937

Lauren Tarshis's I Survived the Hindenburg Disaster, 1937 is a tense airship adventure for 9 year olds about a boy trying to get his very sick little sister home to New York.

What happens

Hugo Ballard is about to cross the Atlantic on the biggest airship ever built. He's eleven, and his pals in New York would call him the luckiest boy alive.

He doesn't feel lucky. His sister Gertie is four and she has malaria, which she caught while the family were living in Kenya (Mum and Dad were studying lions). The doctors who might help are in New York, and there isn't much time.

At first the flight is a treat. The airship lifts off like a feather. There are warm rolls, cabins where the sink folds away and a new friend called Marty, who's on her eighth trip. Gertie perks up enough to play her favourite game, which is deciding which animal each grown-up looks like.

Then she tells a Nazi colonel, out loud, that he looks like a big cobra. (He takes it as a compliment, which is somehow worse.)

The colonel is on board hunting a spy who's carrying stolen Nazi secrets to America. Who is it? Hugo finds out by accident in the middle of the night, somewhere he really shouldn't be. He's only gone to fetch the family dog for Gertie.

Your reader will pick up plenty on the way, like how an airship rises with no wings and why this one is full of hydrogen when helium would be safer.

And you know what's coming, because the book opens with the fire and then goes back three days.

It's worth knowing how frightening that part is. When the airship catches fire, people smash windows and jump. Hugo is burned, and a man is killed by a falling beam right beside him. Before that, the colonel points a pistol at Hugo and threatens to have the dog thrown off the airship. And Gertie's illness is serious. Her fever has nearly killed her twice before, and it comes back during the flight.

A child who worries about a poorly brother or sister, or about flying, could find this a hard read. If yours loves machines, spies and a very loyal dog, it's a winner.

What to read next

Dad teases Mum by asking if she'd rather be on the Titanic. If that sets your reader wondering, I Survived the Sinking of the Titanic, 1912 is the first book in the series (this one's the thirteenth, and the order doesn't matter). George is ten, his little sister is with him, and he's just been told off for sliding down the grand staircase banister.