From School Library Journal
Grade 4-8. There are at least two Treasures in the Dust?Annie and Violet, both 11?whose voices alternate the telling of their families' stories in rural Oklahoma during the drought and Great Depression. A historical piece to be sure, this is also a story of friendship between unlike personalities. Annie is more grounded and accepting of the dust that has drifted through her life since infancy, and her family is luckier than Violet's. They still have cows and chickens. Violet is imaginative, story-crazy, "always looking to fly away." With a baby, 4-year-old twins, and a blind, 90-year-old aunt who needs care, her folks are desperate. When the elderly woman dies, Violet's family is free to pursue a new life in California. Her voice becomes more distant in letters to Annie. Porter seems to have borrowed from her background as a poet to create a story rich in descriptive language and lyrical images: "Anything catching a slant of sunlight looks like it could burst into flames," "too tight with sadness to say anything." Readers learn about life during this period: gathering weeds and cactus for the cows, making corncob dolls with wire arms for posing, helping to birth a calf even though it's usually a boy's job, walking holding onto the wire tied from the windmill to the chicken coop to avoid getting lost in a dust storm. From Violet, Annie also learns about make-believe. A fine piece of writing that will give young readers a sense of the past and what it means for two friends to help each other come of age.?Harriett Fargnoli, Great Neck Library, NY
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Gr. 5^-7. In a moving docu-novel, Porter tells the story of 11-year-old best friends, Annie and Violet, in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. Annie's family manages to hold on to their farm. Violet's family is eventually driven to seek work in California. The girls tell their stories in alternating first-person narratives and then in letters, but their voices sound pretty much the same; in fact, they both sound like the author when they articulate the general social conditions and find metaphors in the broken land. Still, the prose in this first novel is lyrical and immediate, and readers will be held by the daily particulars of the struggle to keep going when dunes shift and change every day and dust seeps through cracks in the window and covers your pillow when you sleep. Violet's account of the struggle in California is just as graphic, including the exploitation and prejudice and "the days when my shoulders ache so much from working fields that I can't bear lifting my hands to wash my face." Both for history classes and for personal reading, this could prepare kids for Steinbeck's
Grapes of Wrath. Use it also with picture books such as Raven's
Angels in the Dust to bring the hardship home.
Hazel Rochman
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
