Finally Joey Flores' mother has stopped treating him like a little kid. He can stay at the skate park with his friends Fiona and Kevin, as long as Dylan, an older, obnoxious family friend, walks with him back to their apartment. But on the way home one day, an earthquake hits the city. Joey and Fiona escape a collapsing on-ramp thanks to Joey's quick response, but their friends are on the other side of the overpass. Joey stays calm, finds and rescues Dylan and Kevin, and navigates his way back home and to a shelter where he, his mom, and his baby sister await his dad's return. Full of action and realistic friend dynamics, the story moves briskly. First in a new series of disaster stories, this holds strong appeal for both girls and boys and features a diverse cast of characters. A rare find in transitional chapter books, this one also works for older, struggling readers thanks to its real-life survival element.

Joey Flores and his friends are walking home from a skate park when an earthquake tears through their Los Angeles neighborhood in this first title in Kennedy-s Disaster Strikes series. Joey and Fiona are passing under a highway when the quake hits, and he drags her out of the collapsing underpass: -Crashing concrete columns chased them, like some awful monster ready to swallow them whole.- Joey then pulls an antagonistic friend, Dylan, out from under concrete slabs just before an aftershock occurs. Kennedy pushes the super-boy idea to the limit as Joey then proceeds to whisk a small girl away from a downed power line seconds before she would have touched it. His aw-shucks musings on being heralded as a hero is also unconvincing: -Heroes were larger than life. He was just ten-year-old Joey.- More believable is Joey-s genuine fear for his family-s wellbeing as he races home after the earthquake. Kennedy (The Dog Days of Charlotte Hayes) follows this slim, but eventful story with a roundup of earthquake facts. Tornado Alley pubs simultaneously. Ages 7-10. (July)