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Reading age
10+
Genre
Historical Fiction
Publisher
Publication date
A fascinating and poetic story of fourteen-year-old Billie Jo growing up in the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma.
Billie Jo is getting many changes in her life; Her mother is pregnant, and she has the privilege of playing piano with a famous singer. But soon, things started getting out of hand. It’s 1934, and the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression are raging on. Her mother dies of giving birth, Billie’s hands are burned with kerosene, and the family farm is devastated by dust storms. Billie Jo must overcome these losses to move on.
The well-written story gives an excellent description of life during the Great Depression and losing your crops during the dust storms. A fantastic historical lesson about the reality of life for a group of Americans living during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency.
This book is written in verse, a series of poems from Billie Jo’s perspective. Sometimes, this book sounded so poetic and so emotional.
The theme of this book is perseverance and survival through losses, hardships of living on a farm in the Dust Bowl, and poverty. Choices had to be made a lot at that time because all you wanted to do was survive.
The strong message of this book is that running away from difficulties is not the solution.
My rating
About the author
“Karen S. Hesse (born August 29, 1952) is an American author of children’s literature and literature for young adults, often with historical settings.
She won the Newbery Medal for Out of the Dust (Scholastic, 1997).” – Amazon.
