Rain Tonight: A Story of Hurricane Hazel

Christine Linge MacDonald, a past director of the Toronto & District
Parent Co-operative Preschool Corporation and a freelance writer, is an
elementary-school teacher in Whitby.

Steve Pitt, who was born the night Hurricane Hazel hit Ontario, has
turned a lifelong fascination with the day of his birth, October 15,
1954, into an engrossing story that will interest readers of all ages.
Photos, an index, and informative sidebars provide the factual backbone,
but it is Pitt’s narrative of seven-year-old Penny and her family that
brings home, with powerful emotional impact, the human drama of that
disastrous night.

Rain Tonight is based on a true story of the Doucette family, which
Pitt pulled together from personal journals, newspapers, and interviews
with first-hand witnesses. He retells it with imagined dialogue and
visual descriptions based on his research. The effect is riveting: the
literary equivalent of a movie, its impact heightened by Heather
Collins’s engaging drawings on almost every page. Her full-page image
of the family balanced on the roof of their almost-floating house as
they commiserate with a little piglet trying to scramble up to safety
with them vividly conveys the alarming intensity of the situation:
“Penny’s father instinctively leaned toward the poor animal, but a
second later it was gone. Penny tried to forget the look of terror in
the piglet’s eyes as it slid from view.”

Pitt builds the tension of the story by following the hurricane’s
travels from the Caribbean, up the American seaboard to Ontario. While
Penny continues to go to school, a deadly monster approaches, wiping out
a village in Haiti and wrecking millions of dollars’ worth of property
in the Bahamas. The loss of life and the destruction are mitigated by
the many stories of bravery and successful rescues that Pitt includes.
Highly recommended.