Dust by Alison Stine (2024)
So much of this book did truly haunt me and pull on the heart strings with its depiction of a teen girl besieged by both a catastrophic climate and parents who've essentially imprisoned her away from the outside world.
Set in what I'm assuming is the not too distant future, the book offers up a preview of dreaded coming attractions - overwhelming floods in one part of the country and terrible droughts and dust storms in another.
Thea's father, obsessed with premonitions, has taken her, her little sister and mother away from the floods of Ohio to try farming amid the stark arid plains of Bloodless Valley in Colorado. It's an unforgiving landscape of little or no water for crops and afflicted with whirlwinds of dust that build into cataclysmic storms the rival those that swept across the land in the 1930's depression.
Even worse for Thea, whose hearing is partially impaired, her father imposes a 'live off the grid' life for his family.. Meaning no friends, no phone, no internet, no social contact with outsiders unless necessary and only the most amateur attempts at home schooling. that don't interfere with farm chores.
Allowed a part time job in their little town to help family finances, Thea begins to experience everything she's been denied - friendships, the town library, a sense of empathetic community and the sweet stirrings of first love with a deaf boy who can teach her how to converse with ASL. And even as the brutal existence in Bloodless Valley reaches near Biblicial proportions, Thea faces a reckoning for her to break free of her father's severe constraints, and for better or worse rejoin the world at large.
Author Alison Stine vividly creates a bleak, nightmarish environment surrounding Thea and all the well drawn charcters who fall into her orbit, forever changing her. 'Dust' must have really kept a grip on me when I realized how fast I found myself racing through it. That's the sure sign of highly recommended read.
Set in what I'm assuming is the not too distant future, the book offers up a preview of dreaded coming attractions - overwhelming floods in one part of the country and terrible droughts and dust storms in another.
Thea's father, obsessed with premonitions, has taken her, her little sister and mother away from the floods of Ohio to try farming amid the stark arid plains of Bloodless Valley in Colorado. It's an unforgiving landscape of little or no water for crops and afflicted with whirlwinds of dust that build into cataclysmic storms the rival those that swept across the land in the 1930's depression.
Even worse for Thea, whose hearing is partially impaired, her father imposes a 'live off the grid' life for his family.. Meaning no friends, no phone, no internet, no social contact with outsiders unless necessary and only the most amateur attempts at home schooling. that don't interfere with farm chores.
Allowed a part time job in their little town to help family finances, Thea begins to experience everything she's been denied - friendships, the town library, a sense of empathetic community and the sweet stirrings of first love with a deaf boy who can teach her how to converse with ASL. And even as the brutal existence in Bloodless Valley reaches near Biblicial proportions, Thea faces a reckoning for her to break free of her father's severe constraints, and for better or worse rejoin the world at large.
Author Alison Stine vividly creates a bleak, nightmarish environment surrounding Thea and all the well drawn charcters who fall into her orbit, forever changing her. 'Dust' must have really kept a grip on me when I realized how fast I found myself racing through it. That's the sure sign of highly recommended read.
5 stars (*****).
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