Earthquake! A Story of Old San Francisco

by Hana Schank

Tarshis writes with the same immediate, visceral tension that Kudlinski captures—you're dropped right into the moment of disaster with a young protagonist who has to think fast to survive. Where Kudlinski focuses on Phillip's connection to the horses, Tarshis gives you that same intimate human-and-animal bond but through a different lens, making each book feel like a fresh perspective on the same historical moment.

by Gary Paulsen

Like Kudlinski's Phillip, Paulsen's Brian faces a sudden, catastrophic moment that strips away everything familiar—but instead of an earthquake, it's a plane crash over the Canadian wilderness. Both books share that same lean, urgent prose style and focus on a young person's resourcefulness when nature becomes the antagonist. The pacing is relentless in both, with survival depending on quick thinking rather than luck.

by Jim Murphy

Here's where I'm suggesting something slightly different in form—Murphy writes narrative nonfiction rather than historical fiction, weaving together eyewitness accounts of the 1871 Chicago Fire. If you loved the authenticity of Kudlinski's earthquake details, you'll find Murphy's approach even more immersive; he lets real people tell you what it felt like to watch a city burn. It's got that same sense of urban disaster but told through actual voices from the time.

by James Murphy

This is my curveball recommendation—it's a reimagined Cinderella set in a fantasy world, which sounds completely different from Kudlinski's grounded historical fiction. But Lo shares Kudlinski's gift for making you feel the physical reality of a world: the way ash settles on skin, how fire moves through a landscape, the sensory weight of disaster. The emotional stakes are just as high, even though one is magical and one is historical.

by Barbara Taylor

Published in 2018, this one's from a different era entirely and takes a completely different approach—it's a mystery featuring young Ada Lovelace and Mary Shelley as amateur detectives in Victorian London. What connects it to your earthquake book is Stratford's skill at making historical details feel alive and urgent; he captures that same sense of young people navigating a world that's bigger and more dangerous than they expected, with the added pleasure of historical figures you can actually research afterward.