Dear Readers,

In many ways, the story of this I Survived book began in November 2018, when I received an email from a woman named Holly Fisher.

“You might have heard about the fire that has devastated my town of Paradise, California,” she wrote.

My heart clenched as I read those words, because of course I had heard about Paradise. Just days before, on November 8, 2018, that bustling town of 28,000 people had been almost entirely destroyed by a fast-moving wildfire.

Holly went on to explain that her son, Lucas, and his friends read my books, and they wanted to share their experiences of the wildfire with me. “Maybe you should come here for a visit,” Holly wrote.

I live in Connecticut, around three thousand miles from Paradise. But a few months later, I flew to California with my husband, David, and three of our four children. We drove past almond orchards and into the rolling foothills of the Sierra mountains, where Paradise sits high on a ridge. We met up with Holly and her husband, Josh, a firefighter who had helped save many lives when the fire raged through the town.

Holly and Josh took us on a drive through what was left of Paradise, and recounted their own stories from that terrifying day. They described their first glimpses of the fire, the thick column of smoke that appeared in the distance. They described how the air filled with glowing embers that were carried by the wind, and how quickly the bright morning turned midnight black from the smoke. Holly escaped by car with Lucas and his little sister, Sienna. Josh remained in Paradise with his fellow firefighters. He helped save hundreds of people who were trapped by the flames.

As we all rode together through the town, my family and I stared out the window in shock. On street after street after street, there was nothing but ruins. Houses had burned to the ground, with nothing left behind but twisted metal and fireplace bricks. Cars were destroyed, their bodies blackened, windows shattered, tires melted away. The thick forests were filled with skeleton trees.

The silence was eerie. We saw not one other living soul. Some houses had survived the fire, including the Fishers’. But months later, people still couldn’t live in the town. There was no electricity. The water system had been poisoned by chemicals. The ground was covered with toxic ash that also made the air dangerous to breathe.

The next day, I met Paradise kids and teachers in their temporary schools. I got to spend time with Paradise Elementary principal Renee Henderson, and see how she and teachers were working nonstop to support their students and their families. I met Annie Finney, Lucas’s teacher, who had turned her living room into a classroom until a temporary school could be found.

Three months later, David and I made a second visit to Paradise to check in with the Fishers and another family I had connected with — Greg and Nicole Weddig, and their daughter, Eleanor. Paradise was no longer silent. The air was filled with the sounds of chain saws and bulldozers. Much of the burned wreckage had been cleared away, and some new homes were beginning to go up. The Fishers were planning to move back into their house by Christmas. Both they and the Weddigs were hopeful, and doing whatever they could to keep their community together.

My time in Paradise showed me how destructive a wildfire can be. But I also saw how people can come together after a calamity, how they help one another, how they can move forward with their lives. This inspires me more than I can express. It was this feeling of hope and strength that I most wanted to capture in this I Survived book.

I wrote the book because many of the kids I met in Paradise asked me to write about wildfires. It’s a work of historical fiction, like all the books in my series. That means that while all the facts are true, the town and the characters are fictional.

But as you probably already figured out, the characters are all named for members of the Fisher and Weddig family. This book is a tribute to them and to the many other people from Paradise — kids, parents, teachers — I feel lucky to know.