Lauren Tarshis’ I SURVIVED series is a hit with beginning readers. They are high-impact historical fiction for beginning readers and over 2.1 million copies in the series have been sold. As the attached flyer from Scholastic proclaims: “Learn history through gripping disaster stories!”
Foreign rights licensed to Kim Dong (Vietnam)
The headline of this NPR story conveys it all.
A list of all 20 of the I SURVIVED titles by Lauren Tarshis is included below.
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/18/916945663/the-i-survived-books-are-perfect-reads-for-an-anxious-age
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The ’I Survived’ Books Are Perfect Reads For An Anxious Age
After the events of 2020 — you might be wondering — do I need my kid reading more about disaster? Isn’t this the time for witches and elves and zombies and allegory? Does reading these true-life stories actually give kids more anxiety?
"It’s impossible to say what is going to cause anxiety and what isn’t, right?" says Dr. Samantha Sweeney. She’s a child psychologist; her forthcoming book about kids’ anxiety is called Working With Worry.
"What I can say, what I think we do know about anxiety is that, first of all, that it’s not necessarily a problem that the child is experiencing anxiety. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Anxiety has stuck around for millennia for a reason, and it helps us."
Full disclosure: Dr. Sweeney’s ten year old son is a fan of the books. He calls them thrilling. But Dr. Sweeney has read them and likes them too — and thinks they can be useful. "The goal for, you know, anyone experiencing anxiety is not to completely get rid of it. You want to figure out ways to manage it. And what I like about these particular books is, I think it gives an entry point for parents. I think it gives them a context with which to talk about anxiety-provoking situations."
Dr. Sweeney says that talking about those fears is the best thing families can do right now for kids living through a global pandemic. They can start with the characters in the book. "What happened to them? What were the things that were in their control? What were the things that were out of control? What did they do with that? Kind of go through those steps to process that for the character and then to kind of use that same formula to think about, OK, how are you feeling? How are other people feeling? What can you control? What are you hoping for?"
Many kids thinking about the pandemic experience have connected it to the I Survived series. Tarshis has heard from a bunch of them.
"What’s interesting is that I get a lot of kids, of course, right away they were asking me, are you going to write about COVID-19? I have a great idea for you. I have a great idea, Lauren, you should write about this pandemic."
It’s hard not to ask, right? Here we all are, living in our own I Survived novel! But Lauren Tarshis says she has no plans to add the pandemic to her series — first of all, we need the benefit of hindsight: What did the pandemic change, what was the impact? But second of all, she sees it as a shared responsibility, a calling for the kids themselves.