(4) YA Horrors of History series. In 1914 Colorado, the National Guard killed twenty people (including women and children) during a coal miner strike. This novelization, which contains graphic details, struggles to accommodate facts into a smooth narrative, but readers will come away with a sense of the tragedy's scope. Archival photographs bring the story to life. An epilogue and author's note provide sources and separate fact from fiction.

Reviewer: Cyrisse Jaffee

(4) YA Horrors of History series. In this fictionalized historical narrative, seventeen-year-old Emma LeConte (whose real-life account informs much of the narrative) documents events surrounding the conflagration that engulfed Columbia, South Carolina, in the Civil War's waning days. Maps and archival reproductions help set the scene, but the genre-hybrid approach isn't entirely successful. An epilogue and author's note provide additional information; no sources are included.

Reviewer: Amy Lois Cohn

(4) YA Horrors of History series. In this novel set in Philadelphia, Anderson explores the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic through the eyes of several fictional characters and the real-life director of public health and charities, Dr. Wilmer Krusen. The horror of swift and gruesome death is reflected in the surviving and uninfected characters, the young seminarians who became gravediggers, and Krusen's frustrations. Black-and-white archival photos are included; unfortunately, sources and resources are not.

Reviewer: Gail Hedges

(4) 4-6 Told in extensive and often grisly detail, this is a chilling account of the Galveston, Texas, hurricane of 1900, which claimed the lives of eight thousand people--the deadliest (and second costliest) natural disaster in U.S. history. The fictionalized narrative often reads more like nonfiction than a novel; unfortunately no sources are included. Not for the fainthearted.

Reviewer: Cyrisse Jaffee