Review: "Out of the Dust" by Karen Hesse

"Daddy came in, 

he sat across from Ma and blew his nose. 

Mud streamed out. 

He coughed and spit out mud. 

If he had cried, 

his tears would have been mud too, 

but he didn't cry.”

Billie Jo Kelby is a teen living in the Oklahoma Panhandle during the dust storms of 1934 to 1935. Crops are dying from lack of water.  The cattle are walking skeletons. As far as the eye can see, there is nothing but dry, desolate dust.

It gets thru the cracks of windows and doors. It turns the drinking water brown and makes the food, what there is of it, taste gritty.

The Kelby family tries to hold out for better times to come, after all Billie Jo’s mother is due to have a baby soon and it has to rain sometime, right?  But there is a terrible accident and the family is thrown into a black menacing storm they may never heal from.

"Out of the Dust" by Karen Hesse won the Newbery Award and the Scott O’Dell Award for historical fiction.  It is an ALA Notable Children’s Book and an ALA Best Books for Young Adults.  Grade 5 and up.

--Trea P., Bridgeton Trails