by Karen Hesse
A terrible accident has transformed Billie Jo's life, scarring her inside and out. Her mother is gone. Her father can't talk about it. And the one thing that might make her feel better -- playing the piano -- is impossible with her wounded hands. To make matters worse, dust storms are devastating th...
One of the more enjoyable Newberry winning books but still quite forgettable. This is a re-read and I really didn't remember the majority of it. The poetry flows well (and it was refreshing to read something different in that sense). Billie Jo is fourteen living during the depression and the dust ...
Hesse's descriptive language is great as always (disclaimer: I've only read three of her books). I remember finding the poems about Biilie Jo's hands unreadably graphic as a kid, and they're even more unreadably graphic as an adult. But other than that and a few of the more experimental poems the wr...
I needed a book for my challenge on my group. And this one turned out to be the one, and what a crap book it was. This mostly is due the way this book is written. Since people are offended when I get it wrong, I will just call it some form of poetry and leave it at that.I don't mind poetry that much...
This is a really sad book. I would not recommend to those who dislike depressing books. I read this when I was in 4th or 5th grade for school, and I just remember really disliking it. I don't know why, something about it I just disliked. It was kind of boring, and it was sad too. It just wasn't my k...
Out of the Dust one the 1998 Newbery Medal, and I can totally see why. It's set in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, and Billie Jo tells her story through poetry, which means a lot of white space on each page, which means that the pages just fly by. I loved her voice, and--novels in verse can seem contrived...
The Possum is read this for school, and so I did too. I am not impressed with it, as either a novel of the Depression, nor as poetry. And the exercise assigned by the teacher, to record the appearance and inferred meaning of various words from the text, REALLY sucked the joy out of reading. It's no ...
Billie Jo and her parents are struggling to survive. There is no money. The farm has had no rain. Worst of all, storms are blowing across the land, raining dust on everything.And then, in the midst of all the suffering, comes tragedy: Billie Jo’s mother and tiny baby brother die in a horrible accide...
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