{"id":699,"date":"2006-02-14T12:26:49","date_gmt":"2006-02-14T17:26:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/?p=699"},"modified":"2006-03-09T20:13:36","modified_gmt":"2006-03-10T01:13:36","slug":"out-of-the-dust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2006\/02\/14\/out-of-the-dust\/","title":{"rendered":"Out of the Dust"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>1998 Newbery Medal Winner: Out of the Dust, by Karen Hesse<\/p>\n<pracut name=\"Almost_Not_Worth_Cutting\">\n<b>The Plot<\/b><br \/>\nLiving in the Dust Bowl isn&#8217;t pleasant, but Billie Jo and her parents are scraping by.  She dreams of getting out of the dust and it seems to her that playing piano may be her ticket away from the poverty stricken little town where her family lives.  But life changes for her after a sudden and shocking accident claims the life of her mother and damages her hands so that playing becomes nearly impossible.<\/p>\n<p><b>My Thoughts<\/b><br \/>\nThe plot is not one to appeal to me in the first place &#8212; as I&#8217;ve mentioned before, random character deaths to force the growth of others is just not a device I approve.  It&#8217;s overdone and is generally evidence of lack of creativity on the author&#8217;s part.  All the same, I admit it&#8217;s possible to use this device well, to build up to it and, through the writing, make it less of a cliche.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, this doesn&#8217;t happen here.<\/p>\n<p>The accident is absolutely grotesque: Billie Jo&#8217;s father leaves a bucket of kerosene near the stove and it catches on fire; she quickly gets it to the door, intending to fling it out onto the dusty ground, but instead the flaming oil hits her pregnant mother, who was just coming back inside.   Billie Jo tries to put out the flames with her hands, but only succeeds in sustaining severe burns; her mother dies and the baby follows soon after.<\/p>\n<p>It might be possible for the book to recover, had it contained interesting characters and good writing.  But instead of that, the author has chosen instead to write the whole story in a sort of pretentious half-poetry, half-angsty teenager series of journal-esque records.   Most of the content wouldn&#8217;t be out of place on a LiveJournal today, and, much like the vast majority of 14 year olds writing there now, it doesn&#8217;t make for very compelling reading.<\/p>\n<p>Billie Jo and her father both seem to have given up hope almost even before the book starts, and though they&#8217;re showing a glimmer of energy by the end, her pessimistic, passive aggressive whining has made it impossible to care.\n<\/pracut>\n<p><b>In Short<\/b><br \/>\nThis was a stupid book. I find it very hard to believe that out of all the books published in 1997 this was the best one.  Don&#8217;t bother to read this &#8212; if you want to read about the depression, I suggest Grapes of Wrath, or perhaps one of the other Newbery winners to be set in that time period.  0\/10.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>1998 Newbery Medal Winner: Out of the Dust, by Karen Hesse The Plot Living in the Dust Bowl isn&#8217;t pleasant, but Billie Jo and her parents are scraping by. She dreams of getting out of the dust and it seems to her that playing piano may be her ticket away from the poverty stricken little [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,25],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}