"The Earth Dragon Awakes" by Laurence Yep

Yep, Laurence (2006). The Earth Dragon Awakes: The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.

2007-2008 Bluebonnet Award Master List

Henry Travis and the son of the Travis family houseboy, Chin, are good friends. Society sees them as a white superior American boy and an inferior Chinese immigrant child. They see each other as equals and it takes a devastating tragedy to make them equals in most everyone's eyes even for just a few days. Unfortunately, even after the tragedy, Chin and his kind are still seen as inferior by so many.

The story unfolds as each boy lives through the days prior to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake that brought the city to the ground in heaping embers. Both Henry and Chin enjoy each others company when Chin's father Ah Sing works at the Travis home. After Chin's father ends his shift at the Travis home on April 18, 1906 and returns to Chinatown with Chin, both children then experience the first tremors of the great quake in different locations of San Francisco. As the quake finally leashes its full fury, both families are still apart trying to survive its devastation. They reunite later in an unexpected turn of events and both families work together to bring each other hope of a new San Francisco.

Although Chin and Henry are fictitious characters, the events they live are based on fact. Readers can visually see the devastating effects of the 1906 earthquake through pictures at the end of the book and receive insight from comments given by author Laurence Yep.

Yep's liberal use of understatement drives home much of what Chin and Henry experience, and the use of figurative language beginning with the underground "great earth dragon" gives life to the story!