They Survived Mount st Helens

School Library Journal

Gr 3-6-A collection of stories about survivors and some nonsurvivors of the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980. The book has a couple of interesting and helpful maps and diagrams, but the black-and-white photographs are grainy and uninteresting, and none of the people whose stories are included appear in any of them. The text is action filled, but some students may become confused by Stine's technique of switching back and forth between accounts as she tries to describe what was happening to different people in different places at the same time. General facts about volcanoes are supplied, and some vocabulary is explained. This is an average title with nothing much to recommend it. Patricia Lauber's Volcano (Bradbury, 1986) and Marian T. Place's Mount St. Helens (Dodd, 1981) are far better choices.-Carol Torrance, Lincoln School Library, Kearny, NJ