The Buffalo Storm

By Katherine Applegate http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Katherine-Applegate/4063
Illustrated by Jan Ormerod http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Jan-Ormerod/707595
Published Clarion Books, New York, 2007
ISBN 978-0-618-53597-2
watercolor

**Simile"Like a bread loaf ready for the oven" & "like beads slowly stringing"
Annotation
A young girl must leave her beloved grandmother and join the wagon train heading west to Oregon for a better life. She faces storms and her fears of change.
Personal Reaction
This is a heartwarming tale of a girl leaving her life and grandmother to start a new better life in the west with her father and pregnant mother. The way the story takes a depth to it, but stays simple gives evidence that the author is an experienced novel writer. During this young girls travel on the Oregon trail, small things tell of the wear and tear of the trip, such as worn out shoes, and a tattered dress, the seasons changing and the dramatic storms. The young girl's encounter with a mother buffalo and its baby during the worst storm is almost a homage to Native American stories that use nature as a metaphor or messenger for strength through hardship. A beautiful book to be added to curriculum focused on the pioneering wagon train movement west around the 1850's.
Starred Review:Horn Book Guide (Spring, 2008)
5th grade 
Historical Fiction
Westward expansion and Oregon Trail
Pioneers