General fiction

Out of the Dust

by Karen Hesse

227 pages · First published 1997

Fourteen-year-old Billie Jo lives with her parents on an Oklahoma farm during the Dust Bowl, where drought and dust storms make survival increasingly precarious. A terrible accident compounds the family’s hardship and leaves Billie Jo carrying grief, guilt, and physical injury. Her piano playing becomes tied to both what she has lost and whether she can imagine a future beyond it. Karen Hesse’s Newbery Medal-winning verse novel uses spare poems to portray environmental disaster, poverty, family rupture, and the slow possibility of forgiveness.