Escaping Tornado Season: A Story in Poems

Escaping Tornado Season pulled me in like the tornado in its title. Ms. Williams' masterful art of telling a moving story involving charcters we care and/or wonder about touched me the way Karen Hesse's Out Of The Dust did. I just put it down, and I'm going back for my second read.

I absolutely love this book! Not having read many stories told in poems, I wasn't quite sure what to expect when a friend recommended "Escaping Tornado Season." Before I knew it, I'd read fifty pages, and found myself totally involved in the story, the characters, and the wonderful imagery the author was able to evoke with such simple, yet powerful language. Being male, mid-thirties, and having spent my childhood in New York City, my life experience couldn't be more different than main character Allie's-but I was able to completely connect with her situation, and her feelings about the world around her. I must commend author Julie Williams for building such a rich story with seemingly simple poems. Her accessible style draws you in first with words, but then leaves you breathless with a depth of feeling and emotion. I highly recommend this book to everyone, young and old alike. We've all felt out of place at one time or other, and "Escaping Tornado Season" shows us so wonderfully that it's okay to be different, and that one person's voice can make a difference.

Julie Williams is a wonderful poet with a moving and captivating story to tell. Escaping Tornado Season eloquently explores family, friendship, loss and change. The narrator, fourteen year old Allie, presents the characters in her life with a keen awareness of their desires and secrets. The story revealed by the poems allowed me to share in Allie's sorrow, joy and hope. I thoroughly enjoyed Escaping Tornado Season and highly recommend it.

Escaping is the example set for Allie by her mother and it is Allie's triumph that she does more than escape. Circumstances over which Allie has no control-metaphorically symbolized by tornado season-have left Allie lonely, grieving, and angry-but never on the verge of giving up. Through free verse poetry, the reader experiences what any fourteen-year-old must face and, in Allie's case, a great deal more. She learns how to ward off sorrow and neglect and to take risks that define her character. The poems are moving but not sentimental. The words are sparse and powerful and they engage all the senses. I can smell the damp earth beside the grave, hear the Ojibwe drums across the bay, see the dark water between the creaking floes of ice on the lake, taste the special treat of Neapolitan ice cream, and feel Allie's hope carry her through her own tornado season. This is an exquisite book that I will savor over and over.

This book is exquisitely written. Telling the story in poems produces a demand on the author to make every word count. And Julie Williams delivers a spare, haunting, passionate tale about loss, injustice, tenderness, and forgiveness. The characters are complicated and not always likable yet the author treats them with compassion. She respects the difficult histories of her characters. Readers will experience a wide range of emotions in reading this incredible book--joy, sadness, anger. There are also moments of warm sweetness in the book, where the descriptive powers of the author give the 13 year old protagonist a touching, achingly beautiful voice.