“TWO DEGREES” by Alan Gratz (Scholastic Press, 384 pages, $18).
“Nature can take care of itself,” proclaims a climate-change denier in Alan Gratz’s latest middle-grade thriller, “Two Degrees.” But by the end of the story, Gratz and his four teenage protagonists have made a strong case to readers that the opposite is true.
As Gratz explains, human influence on climate change began with the dawn of the industrial era. Since that time, Earth’s temperature has risen more than a degree. If human-caused climate change hits two degrees, numerous climate disasters are predicted. Using three alternating narratives, Gratz shows young readers what those relentless phenomena could look like on the ground, in the lives of children just like them.
Akira lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. She and her dad love to visit a grove of giant sequoia trees located nearby. But on a hot, dry and windy day in October, they suddenly find themselves caught in a raging wildfire. In their desperate escape from the flames, they partner with others who cross their path, helping one another through a terrifying inferno that destroys everything it touches: “A burning house looked to Akira like a glowing skull, its broken windows hollow like eye sockets, its exterior walls black against the bright orange fire that filled it. It felt like they were driving through a movie about the end of the world.” Separated from her father at one point, Akira must rely on everything she has been taught about survival in the forest when her familiar world turns alien and deadly.
Meanwhile, outside the small Canadian town of Churchill, Manitoba, two young boys are locked in a life-and-death struggle with a hungry polar bear. One thousand miles south of the Arctic Circle, it’s minus 16 degrees Celsius, but best friends George and Owen are unfazed by the temperature and loaded down with supplies as they take off on a snowmobile, headed for a remote fishing cabin. Owen knows a lot about polar bear behavior since his parents run a local tour company. Churchill is “a town with more polar bears than people,” and tourists come to catch a glimpse of the animals. But melting glaciers and habitat loss are driving them closer to human populations, while leaving them hungrier and more dangerous than ever before. And when the boys stop for a bathroom break and Owen spots a baby bear, he is distracted for a moment by its cute behavior. That’s when the mama bear strikes. Wounded but resolute, George and Owen are tested to their limits when another bear identifies them as a convenient meal and they must depend on each other to live.