Out of the Dust
Ratings31
Average rating3.5
I expected this to be a general look at life in a specific time and place (Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s) in the same vein as “All of a Kind Family”, which detailed Jewish life in the Lower East Side during the early 1900s. That is to say, a book of nice characters and small events rather than one story arc that builds, climaxes, and resolves.
That is not this book.
This book tells the story of two years in the life of Billy Jo, written as diary entries and reading like poems. A bit into the book there's an unexpected turn of events that quickly builds the story of this book, hooking me and leaving me breathless through to the last pages. I highly, highly recommend this book.
Billie Jo loves to play the piano, and she's good at it, too. Performing in town helps her to earn some money that her mother saves to send her to college one day, even though times are hard in dustbowl Oklahoma during the Great Depression. But then tragedy hits when an accident takes Billie Joe's mother, stillborn baby brother, and hideously burns her hands. She must then learn to live with the dust and her silent father in a land without any hope. I expected to connect with this novel much more than I actually did. It wasn't the free verse form–that allowed for several beautiful images, such as her mother pregnant in the rain–but rather a lack of emotion from Billie Jo herself, despite the horrific living conditions she endures. Recommended for upper middle grade to high school as one way to illustrate the horrors of the dustbowl.
Billie Jo and her parents are struggling to survive. There is no money. The farm has had no rain. Worst of all, storms are blowing across the land, raining dust on everything.
And then, in the midst of all the suffering, comes tragedy: Billie Jo's mother and tiny baby brother die in a horrible accident. A difficult life becomes impossible.
A grim, bleak novel, yes, but a novel that has stayed with me since I first read it ten years ago, a novel that is just as good the second time as it was the first.