Inspired by Amelia Earhart’s heroic flight, young Winona ‘Nona’ Williams tenaciously clings to the desire to become a pilot even after her father, with dreams of his own, dismisses the idea. When he quits his job in the Chicago stockyards to join other homesteaders settling the Great Plains, Nona finds herself torn between supporting her father’s vision for their future and her mother’s struggle to adjust to life on a desolate prairie.
Initially, things look up for the family as they settle into life in Dalhart, Texas. The wheat boom is in full swing, and it appears her father’s dream of providing his family with a home of their own is coming true. Too soon the effects of the depression impact her family, then the rains stop. Before long, Dalhart is the epicenter of the Dust Bowl.
Like Dust I Rise transforms poverty into pride and reflects the heroism of endurance.
Little House on the Prairie meets Four Winds and the Great Circle in this Coming of Age novel of hope and heroism, set in Texas during one of America’s worst natural disasters—the Dust Bowl.
American Experience: Surviving the Dust Bowl
Upwelling: Ginny Rorby
An interview with award-winning author Ginny Rorby about her novel Like Dust I Rise, by Michelle Blackwell.
2024 American Legacy Book Awards
Finalist in Coming of Age Fiction
Librarian 1146347 5 stars
Last updated on Oct 27 2024
What a wonderful surprise this book was. The story centers on young Winona Williams and her family in the 1920s, trying to escape life in the yards of Chicago to follow her father’s dream of farming in Texas, and the struggles they face in their new home. I found it completely absorbing from the first page and couldn’t put it down.
All the characters are fully developed and realistic, from her dreamy father who tries so hard to make it work, her poor mother who looks back on her freedom and opportunities during the First World War and despises life on a farm, to the farm owner they work with and who becomes a member of the family. There is so much history packed into this book (life in poverty both in the cities and country, the depression, orphans packed onto trains from New York for a new life, the push for women’s rights, among others) that it really shouldn’t work as well as it does. It feels as though so much is pushed in there that it will hold back the story but it never does, they all fit together seamlessly and add to the power of the book. The most compelling parts for me were around life in the Dust Bowl - the author makes you really feel how horrific it must have been to live with sand everywhere, drought, terrifying dust storms, and the devastating effect on crops and income.
Winona (or Nona, as she’s known to the family) is a superb character. She follows everything she can find on Amelia Earhart and dreams of being a pilot despite the restrictions on women at the time, but she’s also so committed to life on the farm and doing all she can to help through some terrible trials. Her strength and resilience in the face of any obstacle are gripping and I would love to see a follow up about her life as an adult. She has all the makings of a classic child character and this book deserves to be well known and widely read.
I really can’t recommend this book highly enough. I’m going straight back to read it a second time – I read it very quickly the first time because I was desperate to find out what was going to happen so now I want to go back and savour it a little more slowly. An amazing book.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an advance copy in return for an honest review. I've added this review to Goodreads, Waterstones and Amazon.
Indie Reader 5 Star review
One of those books that’s difficult to forget once they’re over, Ginny Rorby's LIKE DUST, I RISE is an important, unforgettable, soaring tale of perseverance and the necessity of clinging to dreams, even when hope is especially fragile in desperate times.
IR Approved Posted by Jessica T June 24, 2022
Other Reviews
This book, which takes us into the heart of the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression of the 1930s, has, on its cover, a photograph of a child by Dorothea Lange. And Like Dust, I Rise is the word-equivalent of Lange's photographic documentation of that time and place. With power and sorrow and hope, it fleshes out the lives of those remarkable people who left the despair and the failure of the social fabric of our cities and trekked to the Great Plains to carve out a new life. This story of one such family is told by a young girl, Nona, who longs to become a pilot, like Amelia Earhart, to rise above the earth, even as she learns to live with endless waves of drought and storm, as the once-fertile plain is destroyed by the very plows that were supposed to bring success.
This is a wonder of a book. Unlike almost all the historical fiction I know, particularly books for young people (which this ostensibly is), its characters are not cyphers, with events and feelings created to teach a moment in our time. Nona and her family are alive and breathing and full of surprises, far far more real than anything you can imagine except those photographs by Lange.
Crisis is hard to absorb by reading. The fears whip by so quickly, you turn the page and one is gone, and the next and next are just words. By a fluke, I read this in the midst of a freak storm in the foothills where I live. I read it by flashlight, the sand whirling on the page and filling the sodhouse with grit while trees fell around my own house, taking out the power for 15 days, blocking roads and driveways. Many of us had no water or food for our animals. A neighbor’s house was utterly destroyed, much as the tornadoes of sand took out people’s homes in Nona’s Dust Bowl. I read on, feeling every shudder as another tree went down.
I've learned over time, ever hoping I was wrong, how most human beings do awful things – to themselves, to others, to the planet. Always have. Always will. But, thank the stars, there are also always the Nonas and the Mr. Andersens who see so clearly, give their hearts to the land and to survival, who go on loving and hoping. Like dust, they rise.
—Sallie Reynolds, author of Virginia Primitive
Like Dust, I Rise is an uplifting tale that artfully pulls you into the slipstream of a scrappy girl who defies the ravages of the Dust Bowl and The Great Depression to achieve her goal of becoming a pilot.
—Bruce Lewis, author of Bloody Paws
Interview with Ginny Rorby
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