SOS: Stories of Survival will be compulsive reading for young teens who have stopped fretting over monsters under the bed in favour of adult-themed fears of death and loss, and for those who are fascinated with true stories. They get both in these detailed, child-centred accounts of a seemingly random selection of major natural and unnatural disasters. It’s not for the squeamish: for example, in an account of the eruption of Mont Pelée, a volcano in Martinique, Butts explains, “Volcanic steam enveloped people and cooked them alive inside their own skins, sometimes leaving not a visible mark of violence.”

Six stories are set in Canada, three in the U.S., and the remaining four in China, Ukraine (the ongoing horror of Chernobyl), Southeast Asia (the 2004 tsunami), and Martinique. The historical detail is fascinating, and a seamless mix of fact and creative license brings the stories to life. In the first account, we follow 18-year-old Douglas Tinkis and 17-year-old Christy Ann Morrison as they pass a freezing night “alone on the water in a boat full of dead men” following the 1882 sinking of the passenger steamer Asia in Georgian Bay. Butts mixes Christy Ann and Douglas’s actual words with imaginative detail to great effect.

Despite its sensational style, this book (which incidentally needed one more edit to weed out numerous typographical and punctuation errors) reveals the author’s social conscience. Butts describes the unequal suffering of poor and rich and condemns the frequent recklessness and callousness of the wealthy who have been able to sidestep disaster — such as the country clubbers who didn’t raise a finger to help the many working people swept away in the horrifying Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood of 1889. He also mentions policy changes that have helped to prevent repetition of disasters.

Butts describes immense suffering spanning continents and decades, but by bringing to life individual stories of boys and girls who made it out alive where others perished, he makes survival the true focus of this book.