Product Description

In sixteen-year-old Katelan Janke's first Dear America book, we meet Grace Edwards, a little girl growing up in the heart of the Texas panhandle, in the midst of the Dust Bowl. Fierce, dust0filled winds ravage the plains and threaten the town's agricultural livelihood, creating poverty and despair among Grace's neighbors. Will her family's farm survive?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #246621 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 190 pages

From School Library Journal
Grade 4-8-Grace, 12, details the hardships she endures with her family and neighbors. She describes how they must scrub their house constantly, knead bread in a drawer, and breathe through damp handkerchiefs during a "duster." Even graver dangers abound: dust pneumonia, plagues of jackrabbits, and the loss of livelihood for farmers. Most compelling are the tiny joys that make life bearable: a baby jackrabbit, a dress lovingly created from a floral flour sack. An epilogue that provides a lively summary of the rest of their lives has more plot than most of this episodic novel. The winner of an Arrow Book Club/Dear America Student Writing Contest, the 15-year-old author interviewed several people who lived through the Dust Bowl. One small error appears in the notes: The Dust Bowl caused one of the United States's largest migrations, but at one million people, it is not the largest. As an example of what a teen can achieve when she explores her neighborhood and nations past, Survival succeeds. Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust (Scholastic, 1997) provides a more poetic view of this period. Combine those two books with Milton Meltzer's Driven from the Land (Benchmark, 2000), Jerry Stanley's Children of the Dust Bowl (Crown, 1992), Elizabeth Partridge's Restless Spirit (Viking, 1998), and William Durbin's The Journal of C. J. Jackson: A Dust Bowl Migrant (Scholastic, 2002) for a unit about one of the country's worst ecological disasters.
Tina Zubak, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, PA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Gr. 4-8. In a strong Dear America series book, Grace Edwards uses her journal to tell the story of a year (1935) in the Texas Panhandle town of Dalhart during the days of the Dust Bowl. Centered on a 12-year-old's perspective of home and school, chores and friends, Grace's diary reveals in graphic detail what life was like when farms failed, families went hungry, and children died from dust pneumonia because no rain fell. Old photographs and advertisements, part of the Historical Notes section, add further detail to a rather depressing, but fictionalized, authentically flavored account of a significant portion of American history, which is made more remarkable by the fact that Janke was only 15 years old when the novel was published. The story grew from a selection she wrote for the 1998 Arrow Book Club/Dear America Student Writing Contest. Frances Bradburn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Awesome new Dear America-one of the best in the series!
The author may be 15 and she may not have needed to leave her hometown to write this book-but it is awesome! It takes place during the Dust Bowl in a small Texas town called Dalhart in 1935. Grace Edwards is a young teenager who's father grows crops, her mother is a housewife, and has a younger sister, Ruth. The girls attend a small school, where most of the families are all affected by the Dust Bowl-they are poor, have a hard life, and are very nice and mannered people.Except for a rich family's children-Sadie and her sisters. They are so mean and real that you just want to hit them and make them look like idiots. Anyway, Grace is used to the hardwork but when the Dust Bowl threatens to take her friends away-both to another state and to death, Grace and Ruth have a hard time surving. Grace does volunteer at a hospital for dust pneumonia victims, but it is so hard since most of the victims die, breaking Grace's heart.The ending is especially surprising and touching-you will never expect it so I won't say it here.Read the books to find out! This book is well researched and written, uses good vocabulary, is very educational, and is a true addition to the Dear America series. Don't just get this book to complete your collection, like I had done, read this book and enjoy it!

A good new Dear America book, written by a teenage girl.
At first I wasn't sure how good this new Dear America book would be, since Katelan Janke, the author, is just fifteen years old. But I was pleasantly surprised, since she has written a book just as good as many of the Dear America books written by adult authors. Katelan Janke has written a fictional diary of a young girl living in Katelan's own hometown during the Great Depression. Twelve-year-old Grace Edwards has lived on a farm near Dalhart, Texas for her whole life. But it's 1935, and the region is suffering from a terrible drought as the entire country is devastated by the effects of the Great Depression. Grace describes her daily life in a diary as her family faces hardship and sorrow. She describes their determination to hold on and to never give up hope, even as many of their friends and neighbors abandon their homes in the hopes of finding a better life elsewhere. If you have doubts about reading this book because of the author's age, you shouldn't. Katelan Janke is a good writer and has written a good book for the Dear America series.

A wonderful and educational book!
Survival in the Storm is one of the best books that I've ever read! The author speaks with such feeling that you feel you are Grace, you feel as though the same things that happened to her are happening to you! The good and the bad! You learn so much about the time! You learn that there WERE a few rain showers during the dust bowl. They were not powerful enough to soak into the ground though! I deeply recommend this book to anyone and everyone!!!