Central Kansas Library System

Texas. 1921: A time of abundance. Elsa Wolcott meets Rafe Martinelli and changes the direction of her life. Her only choice: marriage to a man she barely knows. 1934: Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up, and dust threatens to bury them all. Elsa Martinelli, like so many of her neighbors, must make an agonizing...

In a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression. in a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression. Dust piles up like snow across the prairie. A terrible accident has transformed Billie Jo's life, scarring her inside and...

Annie Bell can't escape the dust. It's in her hair, covering the windowsills, coating the animals in the barn, in the corners of her children's dry, cracked lips. It's 1934 and the Bell farm in Mulehead, Oklahoma is struggling as the earliest storms of The Dust Bowl descend. All around them the wheat harvests are drying out and people are packing up their belongings as storms lay waste to the Great Plains. As the Bells wait for the rains to come,...

It's the Depression and it's rural Kansas. For good measure, nature decides to throw in a Dust Bowl. It's not the life Cat Peters would have chosen, but the young Mennonite girl doesn't have much say in it. Driven to the edge of bankruptcy by the relentless winds of the Dust Bowl, Cat's family is desperate. Fortunately, wealthy Simon Yoder generously saves them with a loan. Everyone gets something more out of the arrangement than what they bargain...

Lou Crandall, a widow with a dozen kids during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl years, used God's Bible, Webster's Dictionary, and McGuffey's Readers, plus her ingenuity, to create her own form of "spiritual" bailing wire, used to rear her brood from suckling babes to successful adults. Lou's Dirty Dozen, by Ranny Grady, is a saga of childrearing and family ties that will encourage hearty laughter, draw woeful tears, and cause readers to shout...

"Tike and Ella May Hamlin struggle to plant roots in the arid land of the Texas Panhandle. The husband and wife live in a precarious wooden farm shack, but Tike yearns for a sturdy house that will protect them from the treacherous elements. Thanks to a five-cent government pamphlet, Tike has the know-how to build a simple adobe dwelling, a structure made from the land itself-fireproof, windproof, Dust Bowl-proof. A house of earth. Though they are...

"A story of resilience and redemption set against one of America's defining moments-the Dust Bowl. It's 1935 in Oklahoma, and lives are determined by the dust. Fourteen-year-old Kathryn Baile, a spitfire born with a severe clubfoot, is coming of age in desperate times. Once her beloved older sister marries, Kathryn's only comfort comes in the well-worn pages of her favorite book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Then Kathryn's father decides to relocate...

The dust cloud rolls in from nowhere, stinging our eyes and muddling our senses. I reach for my baby sister and pull her small body close to me. When the sky clears, we are alone on an empty road with no clue which way to go... Oklahoma, 1935. Fifteen-year-old Faith Wilson takes her little sister Hope's hand. In worn-down shoes, they walk through the choking heat of the Dust Bowl towards a new life in California. But when a storm blows in, the...

Ten-year-old Mexican American Rosa Sanchez wants an education more than anything, but when her teachers leave Texas in search of a better life, how will her dream come true?