Like her soft-spoken, optimistic father, Winona “Nona” Williams holds fiercely to a dream—following Amelia Earhart’s daring flights, Nona desperately wants to become a pilot, defying those who tell her otherwise. After she mistakenly thinks their move to the Great “Plains” will help her achieve her goal, it seems even further out of reach, while her father’s hopes as a wheat farmer come into fruition. Her scrappy, growing Chicago family finds themselves in the barren prairie of Dalhart, Texas, sharing farmland with the quietly charming, tenacious Mr. Andersen, a surrogate grandfather and farm owner. But all too soon, the winds change, and like so many other homesteaders eking out a living on the Plains, Nona and her family are tossed around by the unforgiving cruelty of the Depression-era economy and the horrific drought and dust storms that can kill a dream too quickly.
Written in an almost epistolary style, Ginny Rorby’s LIKE DUST, I RISE, covers large swathes of time in Nona and her family’s life, as she matures from an eleven-year-old child into adolescence and young adulthood. Years are sometimes condensed into paragraphs telling of the Williams’ troubles and triumphs—vignettes of their homesteading, their constantly shifting fortunes, losses, Nona’s newest siblings, and her poignant insights. Her voice is straightforward, though it has a keen ability to rip out one’s heart with a single, deftly-written sentence. It’s perfectly paced, knowing just when to slow down for more significant events in their lives, like roaring dust storms where one can feel the thick black cloud choking the lungs right along with them, or a heartfelt moment shared between Nona and Mr. Andersen, whose backstory is woven with heartbreaking precision. There are heavy emotional arcs everywhere in this novel, from Nona’s burden as the pillar of the family, the strongest of them, to her mother’s steady decline into resentment and anger from the harsh life that was never her first choice—a withdrawn nature that threatens to tear their family apart, but is handled with care for nuance and realism to the gender roles of the era.
LIKE DUST, I RISE, is a fictional account of the Depression and Dustbowl era, but the characters and their lives feel incredibly real. Never once does Rorby shy away from the grim realities of terrible poverty and relentless drought, grief mingled with shining hope. Careful historical detail makes their homestead on the Texas prairie a tangible place, while the world moves around them—threats of war on the horizon and the 1918 flu pandemic at their back, political elections, and of course, the stock market’s plummet in 1929. Nona is a resourceful, headstrong, pragmatic protagonist, whose enduring love for her family while her long-held desire nearly slips through her fingers make her a complex, deeply relatable character. She holds the entire family together. Even as her dreams of being a pilot begin to falter—inexorably linked to Amelia Earhart’s doomed fate—it’s Nona’s relationship with her father that helps her cling to that goal with everything she has. Their moments together are refreshingly honest, and quite a tear-jerker. LIKE DUST, I RISE soars to its triumphant conclusion with masterful storytelling.
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.
~Jessica Thomas for IndieReader