Quake!: Disaster in San Francisco, 1906

Karwoski's research is apparent in the many vivid details of life after the earthquake, but readers will be less concerned with social issues than with the developing stories of the sympathetic characters.

Karwoski's novel conveys very capably the fear, disorientation, and shock of living through a major disaster and coping with the aftermath...The protagonist is appealingly unvarnished, alternately sweet and angry, open-eyed both to the destruction at large and the smaller scale unhappiness at home since his mother's death...Quake! combines disaster and family longing for a sturdily constructed and affecting look at the past.

Buildings were weaving in and out. The street pitched like a stormy sea. Bricks were raining down all around him. The ground shook with such violence that Jacob thought the world had come to an end. In award-winning author Gail Langer Karwoski's stirring fictional account of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, young listeners will relive the drama of the actual event and its devastating aftermath through the courageous survival of a young boy.