Synopses & Reviews
Alice and Sophie are cousins and best friends. Alice lives in Montreal and Sophie on a farm near Saint Hyacinthe, so they don't get together often. But they email all the time, sharing their deepest secrets--until one day the computer screen goes dark.
Icy rain is falling, freezing hydro and phone lines, knocking out the power grid and tearing apart magnificent trees. Alice, who has already lost her mother, is now on her own as her father, a hydro worker, is called out to help fix the broken power system. She has to learn to barbecue in the middle of winter, put antifreeze in the toilet and keep herself from freezing. On the farm, Sophie struggles to keep her family's dairy herd alive. When her parents go out to share their generator with other farmers, she and her brother are left alone in the dark.
This is a story of the Great Ice Storm of 1998. Supercooled rain fell on Montreal and the triangle of darkness for six days, freezing on contact to everything it touched. But this story is not about ice, it's about people who endured, and their fear, patience, ingenuity and courage. People like Alice and Sophie.
Penny Draper is an author, a bookseller, and a storyteller who lives in Victoria, BC. The Coteau Books for Kids Disaster Strikes Series includes Terror at Turtle Mountain, Peril at Pier Nine, a finalist for the Silver Birch Young Reader's Choice Award, Graveyard of the Sea, winner of the Bolen Book Prize and a Moonbeam Children's Award, and her latest A Terrible Roar of Water.
Synopsis
Twelve-year-old cousins Alice and Sophie are a study in contrasts. Alice, a tall brunette who lives in Montreal with only her dad, is a fi gure skater with a lot of talent and a bit of an attitude. Sophie, a short blond who lives on a dairy farm with her mom, dad and spooky little brother Sebastian, loves looking after their herd of cows. In January 1998, it starts to rain and it won't stop. The rain turns to ice and causes big trouble. First, the roads are closed, and then the power lines come down and the electricity is gone. Alice struggles to stay warm, alone in the dark, because her dad is working around the clock for Quebec Hydro. Meanwhile, Sophie and her family fi ght to look after their high-maintenance dairy cows without power to run the water pumps, the milking machines or anything else.