The Great American Dust Bowl

by Don Brown (Author)

Reading Level: 4th − 5th Grade

A speck of dust is a tiny thing. In fact, five of them could fit into the period at the end of this sentence.

On a clear, warm Sunday, April 14, 1935, a wild wind whipped up millions upon millions of these specks of dust to form a duster--a savage storm--on America's high southern plains.

The sky turned black, sand-filled winds scoured the paint off houses and cars, trains derailed, and electricity coursed through the air. Sand and dirt fell like snow--people got lost in the gloom and suffocated . . . and that was just the beginning.

Don Brown brings the Dirty Thirties to life with kinetic, highly saturated, and lively artwork in this graphic novel of one of America's most catastrophic natural events: the Dust Bowl.

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Starred Review
This is a solid nonfiction graphic-novel debut.

School Library Journal

Gr 5 Up--Brown once again dives into American history, this time telling the story of the Dust Bowl in his first graphic novel. Starting with a tale of a terrifying 200-mile-long duster in 1935, he works back to explain what caused the devastation and its decadelong effects on the economy, the land, and the people. Brown's illustrations bring these facts to life, showing the severity of the tragedy; it's one thing to read about globs of mud falling from the sky like rain, it's quite another to see them painfully pelting a herd of cattle. The drab and beige colors add to the emotional impact and bleakness of each situation, as does Brown's sketch-heavy art style. Comic panels vary beautifully from full-page layouts of vast fields of nothing but dust and devastation to multipaneled action shots, such as an airplane falling out of a dust-filled sky, that instantly create a dramatic and tense mood. The graphic-novel format works well, but the addition of speech bubbles to deliver quotes seems awkward, since characters end up saying things like, "I thought it was the last day of the world" while actively fleeing from a disaster. The quotes are needed; some just seem out of place. Ending with a dismal warning about the potential of similar future disasters, Great American Dust Bowl is a magnificent overview of this chapter in U.S. history. Pair it with Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust (Scholastic, 1997) and Matt Phelan's The Storm in the Barn (Candlewick, 2009), both of which are more entertaining, but Brown's book is more informative.--Peter Blenski, Greenfield Public Library, WI

Copyright 2013 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Publishers Weekly

The tale of the decade-long drought that laid waste to American plains and ruined the lives of countless farmers is a somber read, but Brown (America Is Under Attack) devotes himself to telling it well, enhancing his expertly paced panels with graphs, text boxes, cutaway views, and extensive quotations from those who endured and survived. He explains how ranchers failed on the plains ("Cattle lacked the sturdiness of bison, and the summer heat and winter blizzards wiped them out"), and how the farmers who replaced them were bamboozled into thinking they could do better on the same ungiving land. WWI inflated wheat prices, the end of the war sent them crashing, and then the drought hit. Brown resists overstatement; a lone farmer's puzzled look up at the sky is more poignant than any frown. Only the physical descriptions of dust storms pall as later passages revisit details covered earlier. In the end, Brown ties the story of that catastrophe to the one that faces the country now: "In 2011, scorching heat came back and the rain disappeared." Readers won't miss the point. Ages 12-up. Agent: Angela Miller, the Miller Agency. (Oct.)■

Copyright 2013 Publishers Weekly, LLC Used with permission.

Kirkus

Starred Review
From its enticing, dramatic cover to its brown endpapers to a comical Grant Wood-esque final image, this is a worthy contribution to the nonfiction shelves.

ALA/Booklist

Starred Review

Concise and clear in imagery, text, and layout, Brown's nonfiction examination of the Dust Bowl contextualizes its genesis in geological and cultural history, the dynamics of its climatological presentation, and the affects on both the landscape and Depression-era High Plains farmers. . . . a complete visual package.

Review quotes

* "Anyone looking for an exemplar of how comics can bring a true story compellingly to lifewith depth and sophisticationneed look no further than Don Brown's account of the epic natural disaster of the 1930s, the Dust Bowl."
—The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, starred review

"[A] careful and grim account of an environmental catastrophe."
—The New York Times Book Review

Don Brown
Don Brown is the award-winning author and illustrator of many picture book biographies. He has been widely praised for his resonant storytelling and his delicate watercolor paintings that evoke the excitement, humor, pain, and joy of lives lived with passion. School Library Journal has called him "a current pacesetter who has put the finishing touches on the standards for storyographies." He lives in New York with his family.
Classification
Non-fiction
ISBN-13
9781328740878
Lexile Measure
860
Guided Reading Level
-
Publisher
Clarion Books
Publication date
October 10, 2017
Series
-
BISAC categories
YAN006030 - Young Adult Nonfiction | Biography & Autobiography | Historical
YAN050060 - Young Adult Nonfiction | Science & Nature | Disasters
YAN012000 - Young Adult Nonfiction | Comics & Graphic Novels | General
YAN025220 - Young Adult Nonfiction | History | United States - 20th Century
YAN050070 - Young Adult Nonfiction | Science & Nature | Earth Sciences
YAN038100 - Young Adult Nonfiction | People & Places | United States - General
Library of Congress categories
History
20th century
Social conditions
Depressions
1929
Dust storms
Farm life
Great Plains
Farmers
Dust Bowl Era, 1931-1939
Droughts
Cartoons and comics
Comics (Graphic works)
Historical comics
Nonfiction comics
Bluebonnet Awards
Nominee 2016 - 2016
William Allen White Childens Book Award
Nominee 2016 - 2016
Young Hoosier Book Award
Nominee 2016 - 2016

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