Book Review: The Dust Bowl Orphans by Suzette D Harrison #booktube

Hello my name is Jim. Welcome to my Booktube 
channel about books, reading and stuff.
In this video, I want to give a review of the 
Dust Bowl Orphans by Suzette D Harrison, this was  
the best book I read in the month of January and 
it’s due for release tomorrow the 7th of February.
As you can see on the cover, 
there’s these two young girls  
of African-American descent on a dust road 
looking away from us. These two girls are Faith,  
aged 15, and Hope, aged five, they were living 
in Oklahoma in the early 1930s with their family,  
they’re trying to make a living on their land but 
the 1930s as we know was the era of the Dust Bowl.  
The Dust Bowl swept up all the good soil and 
there were these black blizzards that clouded out  
the sun and a lot of people moved from Oklahoma 
to California in the Great Migration. If you’ve  
read the Grapes of Wrath, you know about the 
white side of this. This story looks at the black  
Okies who were part of this Great Migration. The 
father is very reluctant to leave the land that  
his parents and grandparents had 
struggled so hard to acquire and to farm  
but the mother is insistent that they should 
move west and when the elder daughter Charity is  
killed by a rattlesnake, that’s the last 
straw and they load the mule cart to head west  
and vowing that ‘when the land heals’ that 
they will

return but then a black blizzard
descends and Faith and Hope seek shelter in the
basement of a house and they get trapped there and
the family is separated. The two girls are
released from what could have been a dusty tomb
by these two poor white teenagers, Henry and
Micah Owenslee and not being able to find their
own family they go this white family, this
very evangelical white family to California.
California is no utopia, the blacks have to wait
until the whites have eaten before they can be
served in Roosevelt’s soup kitchens there is a
strong portrayal of racism throughout the book,
both in the 1930s and in the present day and
when they get to California they can’t find
their family but they do find a boarding house
and they struggle to survive. The landlady of
the boarding house is a very strange woman
and she has some strange designs for Hope,
the younger of the two girls. This is a remarkable
tale of survival. The story is a dual narrative in
the present day we have Zoe, who’s an art curator
who’s curating this photographic exhibition
about the black Okies. She is dealing with her own
heartache having lost her child, there is also a
romantic element in this story for Zoe and in this
exhibition she comes across a photograph, where
she sees an image of Faith, which was taken when
Faith was crossing from Oklahoma to California
and Faith is the spitting image of Zoe and Zoe
feels this might help her to piece together
parts of her missing family tree and she’s very
tenacious digging up this historic evidence.
It’s an enthralling story, I was
gripped from beginning to end,
it was (one of) very few books that moved me
to tears but parts of this moved me to tears
and it’s not all grim depressing, there’s a lot
of uplifting parts as well. It’s wonderfully told,
the pacing is very good and the characters are
very well drawn. There were very few negatives
to this book perhaps the older Owenslees,
the parents were a little too two-dimensional
also there is an otherworldly element, the ghost
of Charity leads Micah and his brother Henry
to where the two girls are trapped in the house
and that might not be for everybody but most the
book is very realistic. There are also a few too
many coincidences but great writers like Dickens
and Shakespeare used coincidence a lot. I was
lucky enough to receive an ARC from NetGalley,
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below and I’ll see you on the next video goodbye.