Storm

A sixteen-year-old stowaway discovers her destiny on Noah's ark in this riveting reimagining from award-winning author and "master storyteller" (SLJ) Donna Jo Napoli. The rain starts suddenly, hard and fast. After days of downpour, her family lost, Sebah takes shelter in a tree, eating pine cones and the raw meat of animals that float by. With each passing day, her companion, a boy named Aban, grows weaker. When their tree is struck by lightning, Sebah is tempted just to die in the flames rather than succumb to a slow, watery death. Instead, she and Aban build a raft. What they find on the stormy seas is beyond imagining: a gigantic ark. But Sebah does not know what she'll find on board, and Aban is too weak to leave their raft. Themes of family, loss, and ultimately, survival and love make for a timeless story. Donna Jo Napoli has imagined a new protagonist to tell the story of Noah and his ark. As rain batters the earth, Noah, his family, and hordes of animals wait out the storm, ready to carry out their duty of repopulating the planet. Hidden belowdecks...is Sebah.

The rain starts like any other rain with a dark cloud and a few drops, but then the deluge relentlessly continues. By the third day, sixteen-year-old Sebah has lost her brothers and her home to the flooding; by the second week, she is starving and stranded in a tree until a boy from her village finds her, they build a raft, and he claims her, with her consent, as his wife. By the end of the month, however, he too has been swept away and, before meeting the same fate herself, she manages to climb aboard a giant ark. Yes, it is indeed Noah's ark and since she's aware that her status as a stowaway on the ship defies Noah's plan, Sebah decides her best bet is to hide with the animals below. As the rains continue, however, and Sebah's belly grows heavy with a baby, her survival may depend on revealing herself. Napoli mines the Biblical story--one of the original apocalyptic tales--to find a different spiritual subtext, transforming it from a tale not about obeying the will of God but about how the very act of survival is sometimes the greatest leap of faith of all. The book depicts Noah as a man struggling with an enormous burden, and his strict reliance on his faith acts as a direct foil to the non-religious Sebah, whose reasons for living are bound both literally and figuratively to the fertile earth (she's a gardener in addition to being pregnant). There is room, and perhaps requirement, for both types of faith in Napoli's interpretation, and the ultimate survival of Sebah's and Noah's families underscores that message. Fans of Life of Pi will find a similar blend of gritty survivalism and spiritual contemplation in this maelstrom of a tale. KQG--BCCB, March 2014

Donna Jo Napoli is the acclaimed and award-winning author of many novels, both fantasies and contemporary stories. She won the Golden Kite Award for Stones in Water in 1997. Her novel Zel was named an American Bookseller Pick of the Lists, a Publishers Weekly Best Book, a Bulletin Blue Ribbon, and a School Library Journal Best Book, and a number of her novels have been selected as ALA Best Books. She is a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband. Visit her at DonnaJoNapoli.com.