My Never Ending List

Don Brown does it again! He took a piece of history and made it come alive inside this graphic novel. With glossy illustrations highlighting the dust and the grime that covered the countryside, I learned quite a bit about the American Dust Bowl. I have read other novels about this time period but this one gave me facts and information that I didn’t realize.

Oh, it was a dreadful time in 1935 when the dust clouds first started to form but Brown tells us about the plates that began to move beneath the earth many years before that. He goes into great detail about the bison, and the American Indians who first used the land and how things progressed beyond that. We get the full history before the dust clouds actually arrive. We learn why they came, who they affected, and what damaged they did. It’s a very educational and time-sequenced story, which I highly enjoyed. Imagine experiencing a snow blizzard with dirt in it. Imagine your roof collapsing because there was too much dust on top of it. Imagine birds dying from breathing in the dust from the air. Imagine yourself opening this novel and diving into Don Brown’s Great American Dust Bowl. The illustrations are engaging, the text is geared for upper elementary or middle school readers and when you finally close the last page, you will be well-educated on the Dust Bowl and you would have read one terrific novel.