![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Tourists happily flock to the national park, enjoying its hot springs and powerful geysers, mostly ignorant or unconcerned about the dormant volcano. ![]() The narrator gives some foreshadowing environmental context: Alex’s town of Cedar Falls, Iowa is relatively close to Yellowstone National Park, the site of an underground supervolcano that has erupted only a few times in the past 2.1 million years. After a brief dispute, they agree to let him stay home for the weekend, leaving on the 140-mile drive to the farm. The book begins as Alex, a fifteen-year-old high schooler who prefers video games to socializing, is feuding with his parents because he doesn’t want to go with them to visit his uncle’s farm in Illinois. Blending scientific concepts, such as volcanology, engineering, physics, biology, and climate change, with the literary tropes of suspense, apocalypse, and the separation from one’s home, it offers a well-researched realist account of how an ordinary life might be impacted by this rare, but inevitable, natural disaster. Ashfall, a novel by Mike Mullin, poses a hypothetical account of a boy whose world is devastated by the eruption of the supervolcano beneath Yellowstone National Park. ![]()
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