Literature Guide: Out of the Dust (Grades 4-8)

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Summary: Out of The Dust
Review: Out of the Dust is an excellent book. It describes the hardships of Billie Jo's family during the depression. This book was written in a poetic form, where every page was its own poem. It was very entertaining and interesting.
This book perfectly illustrates the history within the fiction, and the causes of the great depression. The author, Karen Hesse, wrote this book in an individual way. This book took place in Oklahoma, the center of the dust storms. These storms effected the people in the town, and their personalities.
Billie Jo had a somewhat unique relationship with her father. After "The Accident", there was a tension between them. When they were in the same room, they didn't speak to each other. They felt awkward when they were together.
This book caught my attention right away. After the first page I was hooked. The characters in this book were very detailed and had their own personalities. All the characters are fully developed. The book has many surprises and changes in the story. This makes it even more interesting. It is almost like a magnet.
When I first read this book I was surprised at how much detail it had in it. It draws a picture in your head. After Billie Jo's mother past away, she was caught up in her own emotions. She was angry with her father for leaving the kerosene on the stove, and yet still blamed herself. Since her hands were badly burned, she did not play the piano like she used to. Billie Jo could no longer play her mothers piano which was covered in dust. She was somewhat stubborn and was focusing on the past
Even though this book is fiction, it has many facts in it. If you want to read a good book and learn about the great depression I recommend Out of The Dust. It tells aobut how many people were forced to move west in pursuit of a better life. Also, it tells how many of the farmers crops would be lucky to have 1/3 of their crops harvested.
This book is very emotional and quite sad. The end is touching and wonderfully written. This book is one of the best books I have ever read and recommend this to all readers.

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Summary: Out of the Dust review
Review: I recently read this novel for school. At fist I didn't want to read the book, until I took a peek inside. When I began to read I entered another world. The book is very descriptive, describing everything that happens in vivid imagery. The book gave me another prespective of the Great Depression, how it affected the west. The book starts out with a young girl named Bilie Jo. She is a read haired, freckled, tall girl. She has to over come the troubles brought by the dust storm. Bilie Jo and her family live in the Dust Bowl. The dust storms bring conflict into the book. I was never able to predict what was going to happen next, because anything could happen, and sometimes it did. In the book Bilie Jo played the piano. Her mother taught her how to play when she was young. Bilie Jo loved to play tha piano nad she played whenever she could. Arley Wanderdale, her school music teacher asked Bilie Jo to play with him and the Black Mesa Boys, along with one of her good friends, Mad Dog Craddock. She played with them, and loved every minute of it. She played and played, untill one day.......
Her mom was know gone, and her dad didn't talk much. Bilie Jo and her dad became strangers. The only thing that could make Bilie Jo feel better about loosing her mother, is playing the piano, but that was know impossible with her wounded hands. Arley kept asking Bilie Jo to play with him, Mad Dog, and the Black Mesa Boys, but she kept saying it reminded her to much of ma. This book was fantasic, it taught me more about the Great Depression, that i didn't learn from my history class. The pages are all free verse poems, in diary form, making the pages shorter. Since the book was short I was able to get thorugh it fast, but the plot, and conflict were more induce.

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Summary: Out of the Dust Review
Review: Out of the Dust is written in free verse poetry and it is a novel about the Dust Bowls during the Great Depression. This book is about a girl called Billie Jo who lives in Kansas during the Great Depression. Her father and mother struggled through financial problems on the farm. Nothing would grow and many people died of starvation, drought and of diseases such as dust pneumonia. Billie Jo's life is tough because of the all the economical and social disasters. Her mom dies of a terrible accident that has to do with kerosene and her brother, Franklin, died right after he was born. It was very surprising
and very depressing for me when I read about this part because I never expected this to happen. Billie Jo hates the dust storms but she loves playing the piano. Her dreams of becoming a professional piano player unfortunately doesn't come true. The accident that causes her to give up her dream is caused by kerosene. Billie Jo's dad leaves a pail of kerosene next to the stove. Her mother mistakes it for water and puts it on the stove. Suddenly there is fire and her mother runs outside to get her father. Billie Jo comes into the kitchen, gets the stove and throws it outside. At the same she throws the pail of kerosene outside, her mother comes so her mother gets burned really bad. By the end, Billie Jo and her mother are severely burned. Her mother dies a few days later and Billie Jo is crushed. This book teaches us about the dust bowl and how it impacted the everyday lives of Americans. I truly recommend this book to kids, teenagers and adults. This book also has some suspense in it. You cant stop reading it because you really want to know what is going to happen next. The free verse poetry gives sparity to the text which makes it fairly quick to read. I finished this book in a week and it made me realize how hard it was for Americans during the Depression and how harsh the dust storms were. Karen Hesse uses simple vocabulary so it is easy to understand. Overall this is a great novel and I honestly recommend it to you, your child or if you are a teacher to your class. Never have I read a book that is so fun to read and that still teaches you about American history. I give it four stars not five because even though it teaches about the dust bowls, it still needed to include a few other causes of the Great Depression such as the stock market crash.

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Summary: Out of the Dust by Raymond C. Hurley
Review: Out of the Dust is a book that is written in stanzas. Vividly written, the story is of a girl named farm having financial troubles, it is also ruined because dust storms and grasshoppers are currently plaguing it. Billie Jo's life is interrupted with financial, social, and environmental disasters. Though very jubilant at times, it features a horrific scene featuring the death of a close family member explicitly. The book truly left me flabbergasted. Yet in the end, I was left so happy for Billie Jo. While you read this book you will be dying to know if it ends happy, and for almost the entire book you will think that it will end unhappily, but truly, it does leave you with that special satisfaction that you get when you place down your book and truly realize how spectacular it is.
The book starts out with a family, though provided with little, the family makes a lot. This is mostly because of the mother's contributions to the family. An accomplished woman at the piano, a wizard in the kitchen, and a genie on the farm, her mother brings special techniques of family life to the story. Her father, almost shunning his red haired, scrawny daughter, is stubborn and foolish. You see, he always wanted a boy. And when they are forced together, their relationship really blossoms, and it is a truly amazing thing to "witness" in a book.
Though author Karen Hesse didn't use intriguing or astonishing vocabulary, somehow in her poetry I was drawn into the yarn majestically, and I could see the dust storms, I could see Billie Jo's dreams. I didn't know one person that hadn't finished the book before the deadline. It's not necessarily an easy read, but it is not at all hard to read. I found that it went at just the right pace for me, and I am an advanced reader already. So I was constantly reading the book and enjoying it.
I truly do recommend it to you, be it for your class, or your child, the book is a truly spectacular achievement of poetry, and history. Never before has a book combined too aspects that amazingly.

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Summary: A Page Turner for the Heart
Review: I read the book Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse. It really struck me deep with all of the intriguing but harsh realities of the Great Depression. It is about a girl named Billie Jo whose father is a farmer. Her mother has unremitting miscarriages, and finally dies from one. Her father's farm is failing, because of the dust storms that run amok over all the crops, all of the time. Grasshoppers come in swarms to eat what has survived the extreme weather. Everything has gone bust. The government is in trouble, and the economy is down. The stock market crashed, leaving millions of people and families homeless, jobless, and just poor. Karen Hesse explains most of this through one 12 year old girl who just wants to grow up. She loves to play piano, but was appallingly burned from Kerosene in a freak accident. Billie Jo can't play anymore, and her mother was pregnant with 3rd degree burns covered all over her body.
Everything was so depressing and blunt in the voice of Billie Jo, the main character, it really made me understand about the Great Depression. Through all of this hardship and despair, Billie Jo remains stalwart and youthful. She hates the dust storms, but loves her silent father too much to leave. Every single night Billie Jo goes to bed with dust covering her hair, face, and body. Billie Jo is a thoughtful, but carefree young girl, who just want to be a kid and liver her life fully.
Although this is a great story, Karen Hesse didn't talk at all about the stock market. Farmers were not oblivious to the entire outside world, and she made Billie Jo's life seem like it was in just one little box. I thought that that would have been a nice blip to inform students about other causes of the Great Depression. Farmers were not the only ones that caused the depression. Even though they bought too much land and took too many bank loans out. Many city dwellers took huge risks in the stock market. I would only give this book 4 stars because Karen Hesse left out a main historical fact in her book. The crash of '29, the crash of the stock market.
Compared to many other books this was amazing writing. The naturalness of the poems flowed through my heart at such a unruffled sturdy pace I couldn't stop reading. I think that the creativity of the poems and the irregularity of the format was new and exciting. Another, somewhat irritating, part of this book was the randomness of some poems. For example: Kilauea - A volcano erupted in Hawaii. It threw huge chunks into the air, the ground shook, and smoke choked everything in its path. ...sounds a little like a dust storm. September 1934 - pg. 79. This has no evident relativeness to the story, and it has no apparent relativeness to the broad idea. I think that those kinds of poems could have definitely been left out. Personally, that is one of the main rationales why I gave this book 4 stars. Overall, this was a great book, but when I think that one of the key historical points missing, I can't believe it. I would recommend this book to any future reader interested, but I would not nominate this book for the Newberry Award. But it is true, this book was a page turner for the heart.

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Summary: Out of the Dust-A Review
Review: I recently read Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse and was astonished by the heartfelt feelings that I was left with. Out of the Dust is a book about Billie Jo; a 14 year old girl growing up in Oklahoma during the Great Depression. Her life is hard and Karen Hesse clearly states her troubles so that the reader cares and feels for the characters in the story. I rate this book 5 gleaming stars because it kept me reading and begging for more when I finished. The reason I really enjoyed Out of the Dust so much was because of how Hesse described the environment that Billie Jo grows up in, and how Hesse goes into detail about what the characters are thinking. The metaphors in this book are thought provoking and really interested me when I read the book. For example: on page 172 "Help from Uncle Sam" Billie Jo writes; So my father said ok. Anything to keep going. He put the paper work on the shelf, beside ma's book of poetry and the invitation from Aunt Ellis. He just keeps that invitation from her, glowering down at me from the top shelf above the piano. I was really interested in this qoute because Aunt Ellis' letter on her mother's piano acts as a metaphor. It means that Billile Jo's father doesn't want her to go so he places the letter on her mother's piano. To me, he did this because he knew Billie Jo would never touch anything on her mothers piano. I also really enjoyed this book because it teaches about the importance of family. Know matter what your family members do, deep down inside you love them and always will love them. This can be seen when Billie Jo gets stuck in a dust storm, so her father goes into the storom in search of her (page 142-146.) Another form of love between family members is even after Billie Jo's father murdered her mother, there is still a bond between the two of them that will never die off. This book is excellent because it describes the importance of family and clearly defines the saying 'home is where the heart is.' I think this book deserves all 5 stars and definitly deserves to have won the Newbery Medal. This is one of Karens Hesse's greatest achievments and a benefit to the literature society.

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Summary: A spectacular read...
Review: This book was truly amazing. Not only does the story fascinate and engage the reader, but each poem stands on its own as a beautiful and honest pice of writing. This book is fabulous as young adult literature and would be an excellent resource for all teachers, especially those finding it diffuicult to transition between prose and poetry. This is not a difficult read, but it is a fresh and worthwhile one.

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Summary: A True Life Story of Dust Bowl Days in Oklahoma
Review: Realistic narrative free verse of life on a poor farm as it was experienced by a sensitive young girl during the Dust Bowl days in Oklahoma. Grim experiences and desperate ways of coping with a steadfast endurance, evoke appreciation, respect and sympathy for the heart-wrenching characters as they stuggle to survive through it all. An award winning book geared to the young adult reader.
Evelyn Horan-teacher/counselor/author
Award winning children's historic fiction
Jeannie, A Texas Frontier Girl, Book One
Jeannie, A Texas Frontier Girl, Book Two

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Summary: Hope
Review: This book is a superior telling of the human spirit told completely through poems. Billie Jo is a teenager living in the Oklahoma Dustbowl during the Great Depression when an accident costs her her mother, baby brother, and badly burns her hands. Unable to forgive herself or her father she longs to leave, to be out of the dust. But when she does she realizes her home is with her father and learns to forgive him and herself. She realizes she can't be out of the dust because the dust is who she is, and that's good enough. This story if full of lessons such as forgiveness, acceptance, love, and most of all hope. Billie Jo showed me that our tragedies shape who we are and we are better for having had them.

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Summary: Out of This World~!
Review: This book is by Karen Hesse. This is a loving family in the middle of a dust storm. The 14 year old little girl's name is Billie Jo. She loved to play piano~! There was an accident right before Ma had her baby. Then the accident happened and it hurt everyone but not as bad as it hurt Ma.
Well, i will let you start the book for your self but i swear this will be one of the best you will read. I highly think if your looking for a good book this is the one for you.