Module 4: Newbery Winner

"I sensed it before I knew it was coming. I heard it, smelled it, tasted it. Dust". 

Out of the Dust Karen Hesse

Book Summary:
Billie Jo was fourteen in 1935, and she must endure the harshness of life during the great depression living in the Dust Bowl of the Oklahoma Panhandle. The quiet strength she displays while dealing with unspeakable loss is as surprising as it is inspiring.

This is a Newbery Award-winning story. It chronicles Oklahoma's staggering dust storms, and the environmental--and emotional--turmoil they leave in their path. An unforgettable tribute to hope and inner strength.

The picture of a young girl on the cover is a real girl, not a model. In the book, there is a section in the back of the novel that explains the girl on the cover. Her name was Lucille Burroughs, and she had lived during the Dust Bowl. She lived in Hale County, Alabama. Karen Hesse kept a photo of Lucille nearby while she worked on Out of the Dust. Lucille was her inspiration for Billie Jo's character.

Reference: Hess, K. (1997). Out of The Dust, New York. N.Y. Scholastic Press.

Impressions:
Billie Jo's whole life changed when her mother died. She was almost barely holding on before her mother's death, but with the loss of her mother and the loss of her piano [playing, she was in complete despair. The relationship with her father became almost unbearable since at first, her father does blame her for her mother's death even though it was his irresponsibility that left the fuel bucket next to the stove, what kind of idiot would do that??

She talks about not wanting to live when her mother died. However, she learns that life goes on and that you have to take it one day at a time. Billie Jo also learned that even though she wanted to escape the dust, she didn't want to leave her father. Even though they didn't talk much, being with her father and not talking was better than being all alone and not having a place to call home.

Billie Jo realized that she needed to be with her father because he was all that she had left in the world. When she finally went through with her plan of running away, it showed Billie Jo how much she needed her father and that living with him was better than being alone, which was dangerous for a young girl.

This girl finally begins to let go of her past and pain. She plays the piano again, and it is cathartic for her, and then she realizes that even though the dust has changed her, it's for the better. She's a better person because of the dust and her mother and brother's deaths. Billie Jo has finally realized and accepted who she is.

Professional Review: 

First published in the United States in 1997, and winner of the Newbery Medal the following year, Karen Hesse’s verse novel is unquestionably one of the most accomplished examples of this particular genre we have had to date: the poetry here is sufficiently impressive to be considered on its merits as poetry and not merely as a gimmicky adjunct in the construction of the plot. Set in the American Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, complete with some extremely effective use of contemporary detail and reference, the novel has at its centre, and as its narrator, 14-yearold Billie Jo Kelby, a name which should, perhaps, alert us to the story’s folksy, country and Western undertone: ‘As summer wheat came ripe,/so did I,/ born at home, on the kitchen floor./Ma crouched,/ barefoot, bare bottomed/over the swept boards,/ because that’s where Daddy said it’d be best.’ But, harrowing as the events in her young life is to prove, the novel offers no easy comforts in sentimental outcomes. The conflicts between Billie Jo and her parents, an accident (tragic in its consequences) befalling her mother and her determination to move away ‘out of the dust’ provide the material for a narrative in which moods of despair and hope, entrapment and escape, are skillful – and often poignantly – juxtaposed. The verse format gives the story a sense of brevity, of tightness and emotional restraint wholly in keeping with the spare, uncluttered style of its narrator and yet sufficiently suggestive to reconstruct a period and place with great conviction. The Newbery judges of a decade ago knew what they were doing!

Dunbar, R. (N.D.) [Review of Out of The Dust By Karen Hess] Inis Online Magazine, Children’s Books Ireland Retrieved from http://www.bing.com/images/searchq=dust+bowl+train&view=detailv2&id=BCF9EEB1E32ACE67CCD7E8816FDC936844774F48&selectedindex=14&ccid=SzVdwSR1&simid=608021474108048322&thid=OIP.M4b355dc124757fa5bf4d3475b44a1d1bo0&mode=overlay&first=1

Library Uses:

My library is in the Texas Panhandle, and this book has a special meaning for all of us who live in this part of the country. We can still see evidence of the Dust Bowl and the effects of life during that time. Abandoned homes and shacks still stand the area that people go out and photograph. Also, the changes that occurred in our area directly because of that environmental disaster are all around us. This is a great resource to use for teaching a class about the local environment. This book can be used in conjunction with a screening of the movie The Dust Bowl, by Ken Burns. It could be a wonderful springboard for discussing the history of the Texas Panhandle during the Dustbowl.