Book Reviews Module 3 --Poetry-- Karen Hesse's OUT OF THE DUST

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hesse, Karen. 1997. OUT OF THE DUST. NY: Scholastic.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Karen Hesse uses poetry to write a novel, mimicking the scarcity of water and hope with her sparse words. Each poem can stand alone, but taken together weave a story fraught with the spiking emotions of a young teen most of the audience can relate to even across the decades since the Great Depression.

Because the poems are short, reluctant readers should feel little or no threat at the thought of reading the novel. The characters and plot are revealed slowly, and readers are given the burden (or freedom) of grasping as much or as little as they can handle. For example, in “Outlined in Dust” Billie Jo is imagining what it must be like for her father to live without her mother when she says, “Now he smells of dust and coffee, tobacco and cows. None of the musky woman smell left that was Ma.” Through the imagery of these lines, the reader can sense how much they both miss Ma.

Hesse successfully uses figurative language throughout the novel, like in the poem “Hope” she is describing the rain that finally comes to Oklahoma, “steady as a good friend who walks beside you, not getting in your way, staying with you through a hard time.” Such uses of personification, simile, and metaphor can be isolated for demonstration purposes in the classroom or simply enjoyed in its own context.


REVIEW EXCERPTS
Publisher’s Weekly starred review
Hesse’s sparse prose adroitly traces Billie Jo’s journey in and out of darkness…With each meticulously arranged entry she paints a vivid picture of Billie Jo’s emotions, ranging from desolation…to longing…to hope.

School Library Journal starred review

Booklist starred review

Kirkus Reviews
Hesse presents a hale and determined heroine who confronts unrelenting misery and begins to transcend it. The poem/novel ends with only a trace of hope; there are o pat endings, but a glimpse of beauty wrought from brutal reality.

CONNECTIONS
*Choose excerpts to prepare and demonstrate for UIL Poetry and Prose competition
*Have students take a chapter or selection from a novel and have them reduce it to poetry by eliminating any extra verbiage until only the bare story is left.
*Use one or more poems, if not the whole book, to introduce or conclude a study of the Great Depression in Social Studies