Dustland [Import] [Hardcover]

Virginia Hamilton (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Greenwillow (1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0862030803
• ISBN-13: 978-0862030803
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

More About the Author

Virginia Esther Hamilton was born, as she said, "on the outer edge of the Great Depression," on March 12, 1934. The youngest of five children of Kenneth James and Etta Belle Perry Hamilton, Virginia grew up amid a large extended family in Yellow Springs, Ohio. The farmlands of southwestern Ohio had been home to her mother's family since the late 1850s, when Virginia's grandfather, Levi Perry, was brought into the state as an infant via the Underground Railroad.

Virginia graduated at the top of her high-school class and received a full scholarship to Antioch College in Yellow Springs. In 1956, she transferred to the Ohio State University in Columbus and majored in literature and creative writing. She moved to New York City in 1958, working as a museum receptionist, cost accountant, and nightclub singer, while she pursued her dream of being a published writer. She studied fiction writing at the New School for Social Research under Hiram Haydn, one of the founders of Atheneum Press.

It was also in New York that Virginia met poet Arnold Adoff. They were married in 1960. Arnold worked as a teacher, and Virginia was able to devote her full attention to writing, at least until daughter Leigh was born in 1963 and son Jaime in 1967. In 1969, Virginia and Arnold built their "dream home" in Yellow Springs, on the last remaining acres of the old Hamilton/Perry family farm, and settled into a life of serious literary work and achievement.

In her lifetime, Virginia wrote and published 41 books in multiple genres that spanned picture books and folktales, mysteries and science fiction, realistic novels and biography. Woven into her books is a deep concern with memory, tradition, and generational legacy, especially as they helped define the lives of African Americans. Virginia described her work as "Liberation Literature." She won every major award in youth literature.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars A really good trilogy, November 30, 2007

By 

T. Adams "bizzyreading" (New York, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: DUSTLAND (JUSTICE CYCLE) (Hardcover)

Trilogy: Justice and her Brothers
Dustland
The Gathering

From the back of the book:

A Watcher, A Sinner, A Healer, A Saint

They were the First Unit, bound together by a gift of extraordinary mind power, hurtled into a distant future to a land where everything was dust. There the golden animal Miacis roamed and ruled, and the winged Slakers searched ceaselessly for an end to their despair.

Justice is The Watcher and she has come with her twin brothers, Thomas and Levi, and with their neighbor, Dorian Jefferson, to Dustland. Together they share the power to move through Time. But Thomas hates Dustland and is jealous of Justice's vast powers. In his anger, he breaks off from the Unit.

Without Thomas the Unit can never return to the present. And so the search begins - into the heart of a land whose terrible secret even The Watcher does not foresee.