Review Detail

Reader reviewed by HawkeyeRob

Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust is a beautifully written story of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, a time when the Great Depression and the dust blew into Oklahoma like a Midwestern snowstorm.

I recently recommended this book to my daughter, who had just returned a Dear America book to the library without finishing it, something she rarely does. "Don't you like historical fiction?" I asked her.

"Not really," she told me. "I don't like diary books much either."

I convinced her to try Out of the Dust by telling her about Hesse's descriptions of the dust storms, which makes them seem a lot like the blizzard we had just experienced in Iowa a few days before. She loved it. "It was sad," she told me, "but it was so good. What else has she written?"

Can there be any better compliment for a writer than a reader finishing her book, then wanting to read more of her work?