Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse

Written in free verse, Out of the Dust is about life in the Oklahoma dust bowl during the Great Depression. It really strikes the reader to visualize a time when the dust storms were so bad that people were just dirty all the time. Sometimes it would rain a little, but never enough, and the dust storms kept coming. In an economy that was so dependent on farming, people lost hope when nothing would grow.
Part of what makes this a valuable read is how we can learn about what life was like in the early to middle 1930s. It was implied that people made some unwise decisions in how they used the land during the First World War, and that was what led to the dust bowl era. The U.S. Government did a lot to try to get people going again, but it took time. Even though most of the book is depressing, anyone who reads this would probably recognize that we don’t have it so bad! We see people who learned how to try doing things differently when the old way had not worked very well. At the end of the story the narrator had come to realize how important home is, and she had hope for the future.

Review by David Dunkerton