Books/Terror at Bottle Creek
Novel · Young readers
Terror at Bottle Creek
A category-three hurricane, an ancient Indian mound, two girls who should not be there, and a black bear in the next tree over.
The story
Thirteen-year-old Cort Delacroix lives on a houseboat at the edge of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta in lower Alabama. His mother has left. His father Tom, a well-known river guide, is so occupied with getting her back that he has stopped noticing his son at all.
Then Tom leaves Cort behind on the delta with a category-three hurricane coming up the bay. Cort ends up on an ancient Indian mound with two young girls and the storm on top of them, in a tree, with snakes and everything else out there climbing for the same high ground. A wild hog waits below. A black bear takes the tree beside theirs — and turns out to be the least of the problems.
It is up to Cort to use everything he has ever learned to keep the three of them alive, and to come out of his father’s shadow while he does it.
Details
- Publisher
- Farrar Straus and Giroux
- Audience
- Ages 10 and up
- ISBN
- 9781250104212
- Setting
- The Mobile-Tensaw Delta
The real place
Bottle Creek exists.
The mound Cort climbs onto is real. Bottle Creek is a large Mississippian-period mound complex on Mound Island, deep in the delta — earthen mounds raised centuries before any European saw the place, and reachable, like everything else out there, only by small boat.
The high ground in the novel is high ground for the same reason it was a thousand years ago.
The archaeology
The University of South Alabama has excavated and documented the Bottle Creek site.
USA Center for Archaeological Studies →Twenty years out there
The nonfiction account of the same water: the cabin, the neighbors, and how it all works.
Among the Swamp People →For schools & teachers
Classroom resources.
The publisher’s curriculum guide covers this title and is built around discussion, vocabulary, and cross-curricular work in earth science and regional history.
- Macmillan curriculum guide (PDF) Hosted by the publisher
- All classroom resources Guides for the other titles
Read next
More from the same water.
Novels for young readers, Southern fiction for grown ones, and nonfiction from the delta.
