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

Rating:
Summary: Awesome Thriller
Review: Out of the Dust is a great story about love, tragedy, and fear. Even if you don't like sad stories, everyone would love this story. Billie Jo is suffering a hard time through the depression, her dad taking it the worst. Her dad made a big mistake, leading to Billie Jo setting her mom on fire. This story goes on and on, and is very exciting. If you want a good book, you should read Out of the Dust. I read this book for school, and thought it was going to be boring since it is like a journal, but once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down.

Rating:
Summary: Out of the Dust
Review: ... It is a book about a little girl who thinks a part of her life has collapse.She had lost 2 of her loved ones. This books takes you on an unforgettable ride through bad weathers, and different emotions.
Billie Joe is an 11 year old girl. She lives with her father and her mother. Billie Joe has the life she had wanted, she sometimes feels like she is joyful and sometimes she feels like a melancholy person, except when going through severe dust storms. Until one day tragedy struck Billie Joe's family. Billie Joe had accidentally thrown kerosene on her mother and it burned her badly. It also harmed the baby that she was going to have. She lost both of them. Billie Joe now puts the guilt on herself. She stopped everything from happening in her life, even the love for her piano.
Karen Hess, shows how a person's life can collapse from a tragic tragedy. Billie Joe's life collapse after her mother and her newborn baby brother died. The author also talks about how a person can go through horrible dust storms and having an emotional breakdown. In the book Billie Joe builds a wall between the world surrounding her and herself. She is alone and feels guilty for what had happened to her family.
... The book also has a connection with the world because everyone has had a time in your life where you feel like your life has just crashed.
The life lesson of the book is trying to tell many people out there who feels like their life has been [bad]. And to let them move on and look ahead towards, a new and better things that you mostly enjoy,just because of one incident that happened.

Rating:
Summary: A MUST read
Review: The Dust Bowl is raging on and Billie Jo is in the middle of it. Her family is struggling to keep their farm in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Billie Jo's mother wants to move but her father is convinced that he can make something grow. Then,when the family finds out that Billie Jo's mother is going to have a baby boy, everyone was overjoyed. Everything seemed perfect. But, one day a tragic accident occures. When the baby comes, Billie Jo's little brother and her mother both die. Billie Jo is lost and confused without her mother. Nothing is right anymore.
This was a GREAT, GREAT book! Karen Hesse captures you with free verse poems that make up the whole book. Your heart will be taken along in the journey with all the characters in this book. People of all ages will love this book no matter what.

Rating:
Summary: Unique
Review: I couldn't put this down (not as impressive as it sounds, though--it's a very quick read). A young girl's struggle with her circumstances, her life and the people in it is voiced eloquently and with great insight and sensitivity. Incredibly well-done.

Rating:
Summary: OUTTAH THE DUST
Review: I honestly could not stand this book. I had to read this book as an assignment. Every night before I went to bed I was able to read less than 10 pages before I fell asleep from boredom. Hesse did do a good job describing the dust bowl, esspecially for not having lived there. Don't judge Hesse by this one book though, Music of Dolphins is a great book. The other titles by Hesse that you should stay away from are Letters From Rifka and Walk Two Moons, for they both were boring beyond comparsion (except to each other)

Rating:
Summary: Out of the Dust
Review: Like the Oklahoma dust bowl from which she came, 14-year-old narrator Billie Jo writes in sparse, free-floating verse. In this compelling, immediate journal, Billie Jo reveals the harsh domestic realities of living during the years of constant dust storms: That hopes--like the crops--blow away in the night like skittering tumbleweeds. That trucks, tractors, even Billie Jo's beloved piano, can suddenly be buried beneath drifts of dust. Perhaps swallowing all that grit is what gives Billie Jo--our strong, endearing, rough-cut heroine--the stoic courage to face the death of her mother after a hideous accident that also leaves her piano-playing hands in pain and permanently scarred. So go read this book.

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Summary: The Time Machine through the Dust by: Rachel Stotts
Review: Out of the dust is a wondrous book that takes you into a different time and place. I think of this book as a time machine while the main charecter is your guide, and the author the maker of the time machine. This book was a teacher, a time machine, and a great learning experience all at the same time. This book shows how hard it was to live in the dust bowl at the time of the Great Deppression and how people had to work together to survive. The author of Out of the Dust makes you venture to think about the book, but completly... absorbs you into the pages so that you feel like you are watching history be made. When I read this book I smelt dust, felt dust, and saw dust. Another reason why I enjoyed this book so much is that I have the greatest literature teacher who takes us through the book step by step page by page word by word and explains every hidden and concealed secret hidden in the pages of Out of the Dust. I reccomend this book to anyone who ever has ever wanted to go back in time and explore the story behind the dust.

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Summary: Caitlin McEvoy's wonderful review of Out of the Dust
Review: Out of the Dust, there is only one way to describe the book: Awesome! My teacher assigned this book as a read-in-class-book. As we read it we learned about how one family was heartbroken by death, starvation, and the dust. Generosity was also a big part of this book and how they had so little they still gave some to people and thier town. Billie Jo was the character that was caught in the middle of this horrible death of her mom. She was left there alone, not even her love of piano could help save her. Her father was a quiet man with nothing to do but drink himself into oblivion. Out of the Dust is the only way out of this terror.

Rating:
Summary: Out of The Dust
Review: I think the book OUT OF THE DUST was a good but sad book. It really shows people how bad it was in the dust bowl. Also what problems the people who lived there had to go through. I recommend this book for any age. It is really sad to hear some of the real problems someone might have gone through and it makes you think too. The book is written in Free style poetry. In some poems/chapters the way it is written really sometimes corresponds with what is happening in the book. In a chapter called DREAMS the words are pretty spaced out and it gives it a little bit of a peaceful kind of look and the chapter is a quiet and peaceful. So, again I think the free style poetry really makes you think more about the book.

Rating:
Summary: Children's Prespective Matters
Review: I like how the author puts the book in the daughter's perspective instead of the father's. In the mind of a child are the thoughts of happiness. When something bad happens a child flips out and when it happens to the adult mind it doesn't impact as much. This had to be a very depressing time for the daughter due to her mother's death, WWII, and the decline of the economy. I would rate this book four stars because it was very descriptive and had good content.