Excerpt from Zane and the Hurricane by Rodman Philbrick, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"You already told me that stuff like a bunch of times," I say, dropping into a kitchen chair.

Mom gives me this pleading look. "Don't be angry at me, Zaney. You'll be thirteen on your next birthday and I thought you should know something about your father. Whatever there is to know. Something besides photographs and me with my stories. So I tried this new website for connecting families and what do you know, it worked."

"Okay fine," I say, making a bored face. "So now I know.

There's an old lady with a funny name that used to know my father."

"Raised him! She raised him!" Mom says, excited and talking fast. "She's your blood, honey. From what I can tell, she's all that's left, and she never even knew you existed until she picked up the phone this morning. She sounds really lovely, and very old, of course, and more than anything in the world she wants to see you before . . . you know."

"Before she dies."

"Don't say that."

"It's what you mean, isn't it?"

"Zaney, listen to me," she pleads. "This is important, okay?

We need to get this right."

Fine. Whatever. At first I figure the old lady will visit us in New Hampshire and I'll have to be nice and everything, but it turns out she's too old to travel, and since Mom can't get time off from work she thinks I should go down there on my own.

By myself. Without Bandy.

"Totally no way," I say, folding my arms. "Never going to happen. Never, never, never."

Never is a bad word to use on my mom. She also hates it when I say "totally no way." She's never hit me, not ever in my whole life, but that day we have a big yelling fight that ends with her slamming her bedroom door. I can hear her sobbing, which totally ruins everything because it wrecks me when she cries. Maybe it isn't cool to say this, but she's the best mom in the world and I'd never on purpose make her cry. Are we clear on that? Good. So eventually we come to an agreement: if the old lady lets me bring Bandy I'll agree to visit her for the last week of summer.

To call that bad timing would be, as Mom later said, the understatement of the century. Because I fly down to New Orleans on a Monday in late August. The very next day something called a tropical depression forms near the Bahama islands, almost a thousand miles away. A day later they give the storm a name. They call it Katrina, and it's coming to get us, but we don't know that then.

We don't know much, me and Bandit the Wonder Dog. All we know is we don't want to be there.

Excerpted from Zane and the Hurricane by Rodman Philbrick. Copyright © 2014 by Rodman Philbrick. Excerpted by permission of The Blue Sky Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.