Mabel and the Fire

It's a helpful resource for children who have lost their homes or communities in fire. There's probably not a lot of books around for this population and theme. Mabel and her boy do a fine job of illustrating how difficult it would be to experience the loss of one's home and belongings and then finding a new home. It's also a good example of how things will work out, but they take time. The children who listened to the store said Mabel and her boy were good role models of how to cope with this difficult time.

This is a great book to help children process the trauma of going through evacuation, losing their home, etc. due to fire. I also like that it is through the dogs perspective.

This was beautifully written and very engaging for such a difficult topic. I highly recommend it for children dealing with trauma surrounding fire.

This story is written from Mabel, the dog's, perspective. This allows children to process and name their feelings as they empathize with Mabel.

Another very wonderful book to put in my library for my grand children!! Thank you! Feeling are very important and showing them is so important to show our children it’s ok.

This well-written, age-appropriate story. It is a great tool to help children cope with a tragic life event. It also is a great tool to support conversations about potential disasters.

We loved reading this touching book to our son. The illustrations provide clear body and facial cues for young readers to understand the emotion words highlighted throughout the story. While the conclusion might leave some feeling somber for our new furry friend, the mixture of happiness at new adventures and a longing for what has been lost provides a more relatable picture for many families throughout our beautiful and ever-changing Pacific Northwest.

This gives a great explanation of emotions that dogs and kids may feel when moving to avoid natural disasters. Helpful to name uncertainty of where you’ll sleep, being worried and sad to be away from home.

My kids loved this book so much. It was extra special since it talks about something we went through and was close to home.

cute book, kids liked it

Great to use professionally in the schools with kids! Love to use it to help with empathy and naming their feelings.

Cute book for young kids.

This book will be very helpful with the Elementary students I work with in processing and understanding natural disasters. This is a great addition to my library.

With so many forest fires in our state lately, I thought this was a nice book for children to read. Many of the thoughts Mabel had, obviously a child would have. I also liked the illustrations. I will put this book in my son's free little library. thank you.

It’s a well-written, kid friendly story. A great way to help children cope with a devastating life event. It’s also a great tool to support conversations about potential disasters.

Mabel and the Fire can help children identify with their feelings during difficult and scary times - feelings of fear, confusion, sadness, boredom, and loneliness. In a one-on-one situation I read the book with a young boy who's grandmother lost her house during a forest fire. He had only seen pictures of the destruction and his parents had stated that whenever he saw flames he became fearful that they would loose their house. We talked about how Mabel and her family moved to a safe place then a new home, assuring him that his family would always make sure he was safe in any circumstance. His parents followed through with reading the book to the boy and comforting his fears.

Sweet and simple book. Good conversation starter for little ones who have experienced wildfire.

While reading Mabel & the Fire my heart immediately filled with empathy and compassion. In addition to these feelings, I appreciated how the author portrays the story from a puppy's perspective. I feel this protects the children from intimidation regarding their personal feelings. It allows children to feel their empathy for the puppy, while acknowledging their own emotions. It's a perfect imaginary therapy pet. Also, it portrays how change is part of life and once we move through the heavy feelings, we all can create new visions and rebuild the structure of our lives. Mabel & the Fire is a story of perseverance, acceptance, and hope.

Good book although difficult subject matter.

I thought the introduction with information about how to respond to kids who have gone through personal traumas was helpful. The book is a good way to bring up feelings that children may be feeling, and let’s them know they are normal feelings to have in traumatic situations.

Mabel's apprehension is a wonderful way to let kids know they're not alone, when they feel scared about events beyond their control. Mabel illustrates resilience and hope for the future.

Such a great resource after last year.

It was a timely book, in that we were experiencing wild fires. The children were engaged and asking questions. It offered a less scary way to get information out to children! Would recommend it.

The book has a nice information page to provide parents/providers information before reading the book. Sets the stage about a fire being a natural disaster for the family without showing too much in the pictures. Simple pictures.

Such a wonderful book to share with children who are dealing with difficult situations, stress and anxiety. And having the dog with the feelings was so lovely.

This book was very timely and will be a valuable addition to our library. The wildfires we have experienced this year have been terrible for all of us in Canyonville. Children don't understand and this book will help them to cope with the changes they may experience.

My daughter absolutely loved this book and it was so much fun reading it to her.

After the wildfires that impacted Douglas county there were so many emotions to process and this book did it in a way that was easy to understand but not scary. The illustrations were well done and really captured the smoke without flames. Even my younger kids could identify how Mabel was feeling with the clear facial expressions. Very relevant and very well done!

This is such a sweet book. My little guy loved it. The images in the book were fantastic.

Really sweet and important book. Helpful for young children dealing with a major change and scary events.

A well written book that truly helped to explain the disaster in which we all experienced last year.

A great resource to support children and families during a traumatic event. Stories can be a powerful tool.

This book was excellent for discussing emotions and frightening situations to our child.

I am a behavior specialist working with families, and I ordered this book for 2 young children with developmental disabilities who lost their home in the southern Oregon Almeda fire last September. It was so helpful for them, and their mom is very grateful. Thank you, Select Books!

It was a cute book and well written. The message was age appropriate and the message could be applied to real life challenges.

“Mabel and the Fire” is sensitively written for K-2 audiences. I am adding this to my collection of books for my school counseling office. It has the advantage of allowing a family pet to experience the loss of her home. Using an animal gives children a one-step removal to relate to Mabel’s loss instead of focusing on a human. For many of my students, especially young ones, they feel safer experiencing the loss with an animal or an inanimate object. This story will be a nice starting place for working with children who have experienced any kind of a loss. The only reason I give it four stars is that the text missed the opportunity to let the audience know that what Mabel was feeling is perfectly normal and that it is okay to not feel okay. Like many other foibles in life, we need to bring grief out of the darkness and into the light. Children need to know it is normal and part of life so we can help them learn to express their grief and heal.

It is a great book for children

This book was excellent! Your family has been through many ups and downs and this has been very helpful for the small children to express their emotions. I am so grateful!

This book is GREAT! The focus on emotion words in a cute and loveable character make SEL conversations very accessible to students in younger grades. I also love that this book is written by a local author (yay Oregon!) and dives into hard conversations about equity and hardship in the wake of a natural disaster. This is a very real issue that students have lived through and have mixed feelings about and Mabel and the Fire is a great conversation starter for even the youngest learner! 10/10!

I love how a dog is used to express how scary traumatic events can be.

This book is so timely for our kids. My grand kid in particular. The book tells the story of a dog and his boy who are evacuated due to wildfire, which is exactly what happened to my grandson last summer! Including the dog, and going to grandma's house. This book is a great way to talk about the scariness of the fire and displacement, and it ends with hope.

Wonderful book for bringing about the impacts of wildfires.

Good children’s book my little boy liked it

Fun read. My kiddos love this book

This is a very sweet short book. The illustrations are very well done, and I like that the feelings words are bolded and easy to identify. This is a good book to teach my child in a safe way how to deal with big emotions and change.

Good book. Kids liked it.

A good book for very young children to understand that after a loss, things can get back to normal.

It was a cute story

Loved it! Great book to help kids relate to their feelings.

Loved it! Loved the vocabulary it uses for kids

This was a helpful read and great for students who had experienced fire loss.

Great book! This book is written in a simple language where kids or students who have gone through tragic events can relate but also understand that after such events, they will be ok. By reading this books, students are also able to understand that they will be safe and that there are people to take care of them. The book speaks in the perspective of Mabel the dog, but Mabel is shown to express the feelings of which students can relate to and allows them to understand that even though somethings may not be the same, they get better.

My children loved this book. They have related this book to the local fires that happened last summer 2020 here in Douglas County.

This book helped my kids learn to heal from losing their houses from the fires.

Great story!

This book is so cute, and I enjoyed reading it to my daughter. Thank you

Received the book Mabel after a recommendation from a friend. She thought it would be good for our grandchildren who were evacuated during last fall's wildfire in Oregon. My friend was correct. It's a great book for younger kids. Our daughter in law liked it so much that she's passing it on to her daughter's kindergarten teacher to use in class. Thank you for making this book available.

After the Oregon fires last year, I was excited about a book where my kids could explore their thoughts, feelings, and experiences when a fire claims their home. Although we were safe from the fires, this story helped my children build connections and open discussions about experiences with natural disasters. Highly recommend!

We read this book to our preschool class. The children were very engaged throughout the story. It sparked conversations about what the children went through during the recent forest fires and evacuating with their families, allowing them to vocally express what they went through and share with their friends.

I love the story and text that highlights the range of different emotions that can go along with the experience of displacement from wild fires. The illustrations are colorful and show the expressions well too. A great read for adults and children to make some sense of and navigate natural disaster hardships.

My daughter loves this book. She is 3 and has talked about this book numerous times since reading it. It helps to read a story about a difficult situation that a child can understand. I'm so happy that you mail books for children.

This is a great book my son loved it and was very interested

This book was touching. Having been one of the many who could only watch in horror as the fire destroyed homes and moved closer and closer to town, it brought back a lot of emotions and feelings that I had last summer. As a preschool teacher, this is a great resource to help children get through such an event and name and identify their own feelings.

I really enjoyed this book and it was really intriguing for my daughter as well. It's definitely a book that can be used in a classroom when needed to help students learn to identify their feelings.

Excellent children's book to aid in social-emotional learning and help children name and identify their feelings. I am a preschool teacher and I use this in the classroom and at home with my two-year-old daughter.

This book was a kid friendly way to work through experiences with losing a home due to fire. This book can also be used by parents on how to help their child with their loss. It was well written and i want to see what this author will wrote next.

This book is so cute! I like that it doesn't end with them getting to go back to their house, because as we all know, that's not always the case. It teaches kids that even though things aren't the same anymore, as long as you're safe it'll be okay.

What a great read for kids who experience fear, loss, and worry. A story from Mabel's point of view allows children to relate and encourages their sense of empathy. The focus on trusting that no matter what happens, when you have people who care about you, everything will be okay.

This came at a great time as my daughter and her family are survivors of the Beachie Creek Fire in Gates, OR. They evacuated twice that night and the last time to my home in Lebanon, OR. I read the book to the 4 year old then their Mom read it to her other 2 children. It was very well written and we all loved Mabel.

This is a great book for Early Childhood Educators to share with the families they work with in Southern Oregon, due to the 2020 fires and the many displaced familes and their pets. A positive and empowering book that helps identify emotions from the trauma, and gives ideas for parents on how to handle this and be positive with their family.

Our kids loved this book. Great, and realistic for the time our friends and neighbors are going through.

This book was very helpful for addressing trauma associated with unknown feelings and how to deal with them. The parental instructions, at the beginning of the book, were highly intuitive on how each child might perceive the contents of the book as they read or hear the book being read to them.

This is such a cute book. After surviving evacuation from the Slater Fire this summer, I find a great need to share this book with as many children as I can.

A prescient book for the wildfire aftermath and the pandemic. I read this separately to both my 8 and 4 year old grandsons, and followed up with a discussion. The 8 year old appreciated the highlighted vocabulary words (he read with help) and the ease of reading for him. The 4 year old (who doesn't read) loved that the book featured a dog that reminded him of his own. The fact that a dog was used instead of a child to convey a story of loss and fear during a tragedy was excellent. The boys both thought about the dog's feelings and talked about their own. It is an excellent way of dealing with problems for children, and I especially liked the author's helpful hints in the front of the book. The pandemic has definitely taken its toll on children (or the Corona Pirates as my grandson calls it), and this book provides a way for children to express those feelings of loss that they may have.

Bless this therapist! We've been there (lived through a wildfire) and also have wildland firefighters in our family so we are attuned to fire news. Read this to our 4-year-old and was amazed at the questions he had about it - had no idea some of the things being processed about fire and smoke and losses in that little brain. The book was simple and brought enough detail to hint at the scariness without dwelling in it or glorifying it. Perfect tone. Helpful.

It is a great way to get students to talk about emotions.

Loved this children’s book thank you so much there were so many connections as we were effected by wild fires this year.

This book is an awesome addition to our classroom. The kids loved it and got a lot out of it!

Charming and insightful, cannot wait to read this to my very young grandchildren who saw the smoke and must have had many questions without the words. Such a touching story with professional understanding of a child's mind. Especially, appreciated the first pages of instructions.

Super cute kids book. Helps kids understand the hard times some people go through during a wildfire.

This book was moving and really touches the heart with its message of being able to have so many feelings around multitudes of change and disaster. But also that it is okay to move on and be thankful for what you do have.

Such a timely book in light of the recent wildfires and so many Oregon families being displaced! This book names feelings for children and lets them know it's ok to be angry and scared, while reassuring them although things may never be the same again, they can get better.