Out of the Dust

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hesse, Karen. 1997. OUT OF THE DUST. New York, NY: Scholastic Press. ISBN 0590371258

SUMMARY
"In a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression." (Copyright page)

ANALYSIS
I found this book deeply moving, and I think Hesse has a wonderful strong voice in her free verse storytelling. I respect the difficult life of the people, and especially the young people, who lived through the Depression in the Dust Bowl, but the unrelenting string of unbearable tragedy Billie Jo's character is forced to live through is pretty grim. It speaks to Hesse's talent through her imagery and outstanding word choice she makes Billie Jo's grim reality so vivid to the reader, but the pervasive misery of Billie Jo's life is also a weakness for the work. After slogging through so many pages of pain, heartbreak and disappointment, I wanted to see come payoff for the main characters. It was deeply rewarding to see Billie Jo and her father begin to reconnect and heal their relationship, and to see Billie Jo begin to emerge from her grief and reconnect with her mother, and all the dreams she represented, by beginning to play the piano again.

However, I would have appreaciated a few more moments of simple childhood joy, such as "Something Sweet from Moonshine" when the kids get "Apple pandowdy" from the confiscated sugar.(126) I recognize that this is a terrible time in American History, but kids are still kids, even in ghettos and concentration camps, children find joy. I thought the near total lack of joy in Billie Jo's life was unrealistic. At other points in the story, Billie Jo describes the expectation of good things to come; apples, rain, wheat, the baby... But these poems seem to exist solely to set the reader up to share in Billie Jo's greif. The way Hesse did this throughout the story reminded me of the way some maudlin directors will zoom in on a puppy, or an old person early in a movie, with a swell of foreshadowing music, in order to signify to the audience that this character is not long for this world. It was frustrating, but the power of the poems was not lessened by this techniques.

I saw some reviews complaining that readers had a hard time connecting to any character beyond Bilie Jo. I thought Hesse's total commitment to Billie Jo's point of view was one of the strongest aspects of the work. Billie Jo's poignant insights into the people are her made each character come alive. And I saw the character's change throughout the story, both in their own merit and through Billie Jo's eyes, through her changing and maturing understanding. The character of her father in particular was very real and sharp.

REVIEWS
"This intimate novel, written in stanza form, poetically conveys the heat, dust and wind of Oklahoma. With each meticulously arranged entry Hesse paints a vivid picture of her heroine's emotions." PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY

"Told in free-verse poetry of dated entries that span the winter of 1934 to the winter of 1935, this is an unremittingly bleak portrait of one corner of Depression-era life. In Billie Jo, the only character who comes to life, Hesse (The Music of Dolphins, 1996, etc.) presents a hale and determined heroine who confronts unrelenting misery and begins to transcend it. The poem/novel ends with only a trace of hope; there are no pat endings, but a glimpse of beauty wrought from brutal reality." KIRKUS REVIEWS

CONNECTIONS
This book is a wonderful example of storytelling in free verse poetry format, but it definitely stands alone, and would not need to be incorporated into a unit on poetry to be an engaging part of a classroom curriculum. It would work as an American History/Language Arts crossover, with other first person historical fiction of different literary styles representing different time periods.