Treasures in the Dust - Hardcover

Porter, Tracey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060275634 ISBN 13: 9780060275631

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1997

Synopsis

Annie May Weightman and Violet Cobble are best friends and neighbors. They live in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, during the Great Depression. This is their story, told in two voices. Annie is happiest on the ground, sifting through the dust for traces of the past. But Violet is a dreamer always playing make believe to escape, to fly away from the dusty land. In this beautifully crafted first novel, poet Tracey Porter joins together two unique voices to tell a larger story of America, its hopes and dreams, during a time when thousands fled their prairie homes in search of work, food, and shelter.

Annie and Violet's story is one of friendship and courage--treasures shining through in the face of hardship.

About this title

About the Author

Tracey Porter is the author of Treasures in the Dust and A Dance of Sisters. Her most recent novel, Billy Creekmore, was named to Oprah.com's Kids' Reading List, compiled by the American Library Association. For the past twenty years she has taught middle school at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, California. She lives with her family in Los Angeles.

From the Back Cover

Annie May Weightman and Violet Cobble are best friends and neighbors. They live in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, during the Great Depression. This is their story, told in two voices. Annie is happiest on the ground, sifting through the dust for traces of the past. But Violet is a dreamer always playing make believe to escape, to fly away from the dusty land. In this beautifully crafted first novel, poet Tracey Porter joins together two unique voices to tell a larger story of America, its hopes and dreams, during a time when thousands fled their prairie homes in search of work, food, and shelter.

Annie and Violet's story is one of friendship and courage--treasures shining through in the face of hardship.

Reviews

Grade 4-8. There are at least two Treasures in the Dust?Annie and Violet, both 11?whose voices alternate the telling of their families' stories in rural Oklahoma during the drought and Great Depression. A historical piece to be sure, this is also a story of friendship between unlike personalities. Annie is more grounded and accepting of the dust that has drifted through her life since infancy, and her family is luckier than Violet's. They still have cows and chickens. Violet is imaginative, story-crazy, "always looking to fly away." With a baby, 4-year-old twins, and a blind, 90-year-old aunt who needs care, her folks are desperate. When the elderly woman dies, Violet's family is free to pursue a new life in California. Her voice becomes more distant in letters to Annie. Porter seems to have borrowed from her background as a poet to create a story rich in descriptive language and lyrical images: "Anything catching a slant of sunlight looks like it could burst into flames," "too tight with sadness to say anything." Readers learn about life during this period: gathering weeds and cactus for the cows, making corncob dolls with wire arms for posing, helping to birth a calf even though it's usually a boy's job, walking holding onto the wire tied from the windmill to the chicken coop to avoid getting lost in a dust storm. From Violet, Annie also learns about make-believe. A fine piece of writing that will give young readers a sense of the past and what it means for two friends to help each other come of age.?Harriett Fargnoli, Great Neck Library, NY
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Set during a severe 1930s drought and recalling the ambience and incidents of The Grapes of Wrath, this Dust Bowl novel chronicles the plights of two families, told from the points of view of two best friends who narrate alternating chapters. Annie is the solid and spunky would-be archaeologist who combs the dust for arrowheads and sets up a library museum. Violet is her companion and alter ego, a thinker and dreamer with a dose of Annie's tenacity. The hardships of farming the Oklahoma panhandle and the forced exodus of Violet's family to California to work as migrant laborers furnish a convincing backdrop for this well-drawn character novel. The story unfolds through lilting descriptions and fervent dialogue, then gives way to affecting letters from Violet as she leaves home with her family. In her first novel, Porter infuses a barren landscape with searing images as static electricity sparks over the roof of a truck and ``dunes curve around the barn like arms and change a fence clogged with tumbleweeds into a dinosaur spine''; Annie recounts the taste of dust in the bread or the sound of a storm ``tapping like a million pencil points against the window.'' Each girl leaves a legacy--one, ancestral objects, the other, a trail of corn kernels planted along the way. But the real legacy is spirit and heart amidst hardship, which readers, are sure to appreciate. (Fiction. 8-12) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Gr. 5^-7. In a moving docu-novel, Porter tells the story of 11-year-old best friends, Annie and Violet, in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. Annie's family manages to hold on to their farm. Violet's family is eventually driven to seek work in California. The girls tell their stories in alternating first-person narratives and then in letters, but their voices sound pretty much the same; in fact, they both sound like the author when they articulate the general social conditions and find metaphors in the broken land. Still, the prose in this first novel is lyrical and immediate, and readers will be held by the daily particulars of the struggle to keep going when dunes shift and change every day and dust seeps through cracks in the window and covers your pillow when you sleep. Violet's account of the struggle in California is just as graphic, including the exploitation and prejudice and "the days when my shoulders ache so much from working fields that I can't bear lifting my hands to wash my face." Both for history classes and for personal reading, this could prepare kids for Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Use it also with picture books such as Raven's Angels in the Dust to bring the hardship home. Hazel Rochman

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060275634
• ISBN 13: 9780060275631
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160