Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse is the story of Billie Jo, a girl growing up on a farm in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl years of the mid-1930s. When a terrible household accident kills her mother and scars her hands, her life as she knows it is over. Her family’s farm is failing from dust storms and drought, and her wounded hands keep her from playing the piano and escaping into music. But nothing lasts forever, not even the bad times, and Billie Jo can heal, body and spirit, if she lets herself.
I read Out of the Dust because it’s on the list of Top 100 Children’s Books. This book gets a lot of attention because it’s a novel in verse, but the verse element is not a selling feature for me. Though I’ve developed a better appreciation for modern poetry over the last few years, a lot of free verse still seems like nothing more than abbreviated prose broken up into short lines. In the end, I was too caught up in the story to pay much attention to the poetry. Whatever else it may or may not do for the story, it certainly makes the narrative compact and powerful. I give the book an A grade and my recommendation.