In commemoration of the 100^th anniversary of the Great Molasses Flood, Lauren Tarshis shares the story of this deadly and strange disaster in the newest book in the I Survived series.

3^rd Grade and Up

It’s been four years since Carmen and Papa moved from Italy to Boston. Life here is exciting, but not always easy. And then there’s the massive metal tank that rises up over their crowded North End neighborhood. The ugly tank, filled with sticky brown molasses, has always leaked. But nobody imagined that one day, it could explode apart, sending a tsunami of molasses into the streets.

Caught in the flood, Carmen must fight for her life – the life that she and Papa built together in America. But where will she find the strength?

This isn’t the first time Lauren Tarshis has written about The Great Molasses Flood. This sticky historical event was also featured in Lauren Tarshis’s I Survived True Stories: Five Epic Disasters.

I was thrilled to learn that she planned to write a whole I Survived story on this event. This is one disaster that deserves to be written about.

People learning about this disaster for the first time will probably have the same questions I did.

Questions like: Why am I just now hearing about this disaster? Why did I not learn about this in history class? How did something like this happen? Why don’t we all know about it? How did they clean up that sticky mess?

All these questions and more can be answered by reading this book.

It’s amazing how Lauren Tarshis can stuff an entire period of time, with all its relevant history, into a 94-page story. So much was going on during this time period that it couldn’t all fit into the story. Luckily some interesting facts about the molasses flood and what life was like in America in 1918-1919 is included in the back of the book.

In conclusion, The Great Molasses Flood was a truly tragic human-made disaster that could have been prevented.

This weeks’ Weird but True Fact about Molasses

Molasses taffy was among the first kinds of candy made in the United States.