Wind is not very good at picking up dust.
Blow across a plate of flour and most of it sits there. What lifts a whole region of soil into the sky is the bigger grains, sand-sized, rolling and bouncing along the ground, and every time one of them lands it punches finer particles up into the air where the wind can take them. Once the fine stuff is up it stays up, for hours, for hundreds of miles.
That is the Dust Bowl in one paragraph, and it is why a ploughed field goes and a grassed field does not.
The book puts Ray, eleven, in the Texas Panhandle in 1935, doing chores and going to school in a town that is quietly falling apart. His best friend is Dolly. There is a family secret. There is a storm at the end that the store's own copy calls the biggest in the country's history, which puts it on a specific day in April of that year. It is book twenty-five, about a hundred pages, with a nonfiction section of facts and photos at the back.
The science it actually teaches
The reason we put this on Stealth Science is that the mechanism is simple enough to demonstrate on your own table in ten minutes, which is not true of most disasters.
Start with the grass. The short grasses of the southern Plains sit on top of a root mat that goes down further than the plant goes up, and that mat holds a fine, loose soil together through years with almost no rain. Dry years are normal there. The grass is built for them.
Then the ploughing. Wheat prices were good and tractors had arrived, so millions of acres of that sod were turned over inside about twenty years. The root mat was cut up and the soil underneath it was broken fine. Wheat has nothing like that root system, and wheat dies in a drought.
Then the drought arrived in the early 1930s, the wheat failed, and what was left was bare, dry, pulverised ground with nothing on top of it and nothing underneath it. The wind had not changed. What the wind was blowing over had.
Three more things a child can hold on to.
The dust that hurt people was the dust small enough to stay in the air, and particles that small go past the nose and the throat and reach the deep part of the lung where the body has no good way of getting them back out. That is dust pneumonia. It killed babies and old people first, and it killed livestock the same way, which is a thing children understand faster than adults do.
The storms carried a charge. Particles rubbing against each other and against the ground separate electricity, and there was enough of it in a big duster to stop a car engine and to give two men a shock when they shook hands. People dragged chains from their bumpers along the road to earth the vehicle. That is not folklore, it is physics, and it is the detail every child in the room remembers.
And it got fixed, partly. Trees planted in rows to slow the wind at ground level, ploughing across a slope instead of down it, and grass put back where grass belonged. Somebody worked out what had gone wrong and then paid farmers to do the opposite. A disaster with a cause and a correction is rarer in this series than you would think.
Now the honest part. This is a hundred page story about a boy, and how much of the above is on the page rather than in the back matter is not something this note can promise you. The storms will be there. The sickness will be there. The word "ploughing" may not be. If the cause matters to you, and it should, plan on supplying it.
The child it lands with
A child who lives somewhere the weather decides things gets more out of this than a city child does, and that is true of almost nothing else on this shelf.
It is also the right one for a child who wants a disaster book but comes apart at sudden violence. There is no monster here and no moment of impact. The thing that goes wrong takes years to go wrong.
And it is the best book on this shelf for the child who has quietly concluded that history is a list of presidents. This is history happening to a family, caused by ordinary people making a reasonable living in a way that turned out to be wrong.
The child it does not suit is the one who needs a rescue at the end. Droughts do not get rescued. They get waited out.
One place to stop and talk
This one is worth setting up properly, because it takes ten minutes and it does the whole job.
Two dinner plates or two shallow trays. On the first, a thin layer of dry dirt, flour, or a mix. On the second, the same soil with something rooted in it: a piece of turf lifted from the yard, a scrap of moss, or grass seed you started a week earlier on damp paper. Dry grass laid loose on top is not the same thing and it is worth letting your child find that out.
Put a fan at table height, aimed low and across, and turn it on. Watch both plates. The bare one will lose a little from the very top. That is the surprise, and it is the point: on its own the wind is not the villain.
Now the part that makes it work. Drop a small pinch of sand or coarse grit into the airstream just above the bare plate. Watch how much more comes up, and keeps coming up, once something is bouncing along the surface. Your child has just made saltation happen on the kitchen table.
Then ask one question and let it hang. What did the plough do to the second plate?
If you want a second round, wet the bare plate lightly and run the fan again, and you have also shown them why the timing of the rain mattered as much as the amount.
What to know going in
This is the slow one, and slow is its own kind of hard.
Nothing explodes. A family gets poorer, a town gets emptier, animals get sick and some of them die, and children get sick from breathing. Dust pneumonia killed real children in the real event. Whether a named child in this book dies is not something this note has checked, and a parent should look at the ending before promising anything.
There is a family secret in the story that the publisher's own summary treats as painful, and a boy who sets out to fix something his parents could not fix. Read that as grief until you know otherwise.
A word about money. Some children will read this from a house where money is tight right now, and the losing-the-farm thread is not abstract to them. That can be very good for a child or very hard, depending on the week, and you are the only one who knows which week it is.
For a lot of children this is more difficult than a tornado book, because it never stops and nobody comes. If your child needs the storm to be over by the last page, this is not the one.
Where to get it
It is $6.99 at I Survived the Dust Bowl, 1935, and being book twenty-five means nothing, because it stands entirely alone.
Buy it in the same week you can do the fan and the two plates, or wait until you can. On its own it is a hundred pages of a boy having a very bad year, and it is well made, and your child will finish it and put it down. With a fan running next to it, it is the clearest lesson in soil science they will get before high school, and finding that out costs less than seven dollars.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
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I Survived the Attack of the Grizzlies, 1967 (I Survived #17) by Lauren Tarshis
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California Wildfires, 2018: A Fire Starts Years Early
I Survived the California Wildfires, 2018 (I Survived #20) by Lauren Tarshis
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California Wildfires, 2018 in Panels: How Fire Moves
I Survived the California Wildfires, 2018 (I Survived Graphic Novel #13) by Lauren Tarshis
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Hurricane Katrina, 2005: Why They Could Not Leave
I Survived Hurricane Katrina, 2005 (I Survived Graphic Novel #6) by Lauren Tarshis
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Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
