Thursday, March 10, 2016

Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans by Don Brown

genre: graphic non-fiction


Most adults remember August 29th, 2005.

I remember listening to NPR tell me about Hurricane Katrina and that the levees in New Orleans were breeched. Twice I have visited that city of music and life, it broke my heart to imagine it underwater.

 This graphic novel does an excellent job of telling the tale of Katrina, both the horrible as well as the powerful. It's not a pretty story, is it? Houses full of sludge water, floating corpses, government mishandling and the Superdome disaster - these pictures do not pretend it was anything but devastation and misery.

 It is sometimes are to believe is real, it's so much like a post-apocalyptic novel. This stuff really DID happen.  Some of it I didn't even know about.  I loved the actual quotes from survivors and the way the illustrations drew me in and made me uncomfortable without feeling unnecessarily gory.   I most especially loved learning about the rescuers - it made me teary to imagine all these people in their little boats, going from house to house, trying to save strangers.  Very moving.

I would give this to a young teen to help them understand this unprecedented event.

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