Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina & New Orleans
by Don Brown
Nonfiction · ages 8–12 · grades 3–7 · 720L · 96 pages · 2015
Why we'd hand it over
The gold standard for teaching kids how to read a real disaster honestly — Brown's illustrations and restrained prose let the scale speak without sensationalizing, and the focus on recovery grounds the story in agency, not helplessness.