Twister on Tuesday

In Twister on Tuesday, Mary Pope Osborne puts two children into a one room prairie schoolhouse, and gives 7 year olds a storm they won't forget in a hurry.

What happens

Jack and Annie are on the third of four errands for Morgan, hunting down a particular kind of writing. This time they land in Kansas in the 1870s, in a grove of trees by a creek, with a steam train puffing across the grass in one direction and a line of covered wagons rolling away in the other.

The special writing they're after is "something to learn". Annie works out where you'd find that quicker than Jack does.

The school is a hole dug into a hillside with a wooden roof and a rusty stovepipe sticking out of it. Inside there are dirt walls, a barrel for a teacher's desk, and one book for the whole class.

Miss Neely, the teacher, doesn't look older than sixteen. It's her first day. There are three pupils.

Honestly, the school part is the bit that sticks. Kate and Will share their cold sweet potatoes with Jack and Annie, because that's lunch. They've walked two miles. Jeb, the big one at the back, has walked five, and he can't read a word, and he is absolutely furious about it.

Jack tries to whisper him the next line of a poem to help. It goes very badly. Jeb takes it as showing off and threatens to fight him, and Jack spends most of the book quietly dreading him.

Your reader gets a lot of prairie life along the way without any of it feeling like a lesson. Hailstones on the roof send the children diving under their arms, because last spring the same noise meant grasshoppers, millions of them, and they ate the crops and the fruit trees and then started on the bedsheets.

Then the sky turns green, and the funnel drops.

The twister sequence is the real thing, and it's the one to know about before you hand this over. Jack and Annie are blown flat on the grass and have to crawl. The schoolhouse door is ripped off its hinges while they're banging on it. Everyone ends up in a pitch black cellar listening to it roar overhead, and what it leaves behind is not a small amount of damage.

Nobody is hurt, and that is clear well before the chapter ends. For a child who likes being a bit terrified it's brilliant. For one who worries about weather at bedtime, save it for daytime.

Jeb is the reason to read to the end, and that's as much as should be said here.

What to read next

For a reader who would rather be the pioneer than watch one roll past, there's The Race to Chimney Rock. It's a choose your own path story set in 1850. Your reader picks the route, and can get it badly wrong.