The Great American Dust Bowl

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