Dust Girl

An ambitious and mostly successful combination of magical adventure and historical novel, this story of a half fairy girl set during the dust bowl years really brings that era to life with lively jazz clubs, deserted towns, racial inequities, and mountain high clouds of swirling, smothering dust. Though Callie has never known her piano playing father, her mother is sure he will be returning to the formerly fancy hotel they run and call home. Most people in their dust buried community have already fled, but hope keeps Callie's mother there until she is whisked away in a dust storm that seems to have been magically conjured when Callie tried playing her father's piano for the first time.

Callie sets out on a cross country venture to find her mother with a homeless but resourceful boy she's just met, discovering her magic abilities as she goes. While not effortless and without cost, her magic solutions came a little too easily for my taste. That said I still enjoyed the book plenty and read right through it. I'm looking forward to its sequel. ( )

And then I read Dust Girl, which is quite different in that it takes place in Kansas in the 1930s. And I love the world that Sarah Zettel created–the sense of the suffocating dust, the creepiness of the monsters. I like the characters too, and the way Zettel interweaves Callie’s different identities. So it’s fast-paced, Midwestern based, with great descriptions and good characters. Why don’t I love it?

I just don’t know. Sometimes that happens with books–I think I ought to love them, but there’s something so indefinable that I struggle with how to express it. I can’t even tell if it’s just a personal issue or there’s something very subtly wrong with the book. In this case, I think it has more to do with personal issues in that the book is a US-based fairy tale and somehow, for me, fairies are European, or at least not Midwestern. Cool glades and forests and stone. But I like the concept of what Zettel has done, and she executes it very well, which makes it all the more frustrating that I can’t just be all, “YOU GUYS THIS BOOK!”

But it may also be that the story tries to take on so much–racial identity and being Jewish in the 1930s, and rumrunning and divisions in the Unseelie Court, and music, and finding out that you’re not who you thought you were, and and and. It’s an ambitious scope and I’m not quite sure the book can carry the weight of them. Again, it’s one of those books where I’m really unsure why I reacted to it the way that I did. So if you’re intrigued, I’d say, check it out.

( )

DUST GIRL is a bottom-of-the-YA-age-group novel that impressively combines historical and fantasy elements. It’s set in Kansas during the Dust Bowl, five years into the drought that’s killed crops and forced established families to abandon their homes and seek better fortune elsewhere. Slow Run, where our heroine Callie was born and raised, has slowly turned from an agricultural center into a ghost town.

That’s not all, of course. Callie’s mother is a little crazy. Callie herself is dying of dust pneumonia, her lungs filling up with dirt that’s slowly suffocating her. And she’s a mixed-race child, with a white mother and a black father, during Segregation.

If you read the book blurb, you know this is a fairy story. That Callie’s absent father is a fairy prince, making Callie a fairy princess. You might think that the fantasy elements would offer an escape from the grim, dry reality of the Kansas Dust Bowl. This is a middle-grade paranormal, after all – surely there will be iridescent wings and silk gowns and marble fountains somewhere along the line? But, no, Sarah Zettel defies expectations.

There’s magic aplenty in DUST GIRL, but all of it is themed. Zettel takes up fairy lore that we all know (the Seelie/Unseelie court, the deadly potency of iron, etc.) and wraps it up with issues like race relations and poverty. For example: the “Unseelie” fairies are dark-skinned, making Callie appear to be mixed race, and one of the court’s primary sources of magic is jazz music. DUST GIRL is, bizarrely, a fairy story that refuses to indulge even the smallest escapist tendency. All of the fantastical elements lead the reader deeper into the history.

My biggest problem with the book was Callie. I had no idea how old she was. The book is narrated from her point of view and sometimes her vocabulary would be very sophisticated but at others very simple. Sometimes her understanding of the world felt very childlike, and at other times more adult. She could have been anywhere from eight to fifteen, and I was never sure. I couldn’t get a really solid bead on her personality, either. Sometimes she was meek and obedient. Sometimes she had gumption. I was never sure what sparked one side of her character to come out over the other and she ended up just plain not making any sense to me.

I think a lot of people are going to love this book. The worldbuilding is a feat in itself. I do recommend it to anyone who’s thrilled at the prospect of a non-escapist book about a fairy princess. Personally, however…because the heroine never grabbed my heart, the book itself didn’t either. I was impressed, but I didn’t fall in love. ( )

so good! I only had one minor spoilerific quibble. longer review to come. ( )

Callie and her mother live in and maintain the Imperial Hotel right in the midst of Dust Bowl-era Slow Run, Kansas - a town which has pretty much emptied out due to the relentless dust storms. They won't leave though as her mother waits for the return of Daniel LeRoux, Callie's father, even as Callie suffers from "dust pneumonia." Just as both are desperate for a change, suddenly life takes a different route as the two become separated, and Callie begins the ride of her life. On her journey she will make friends [and enemies], discover the fact that she's not entirely human, and learn that nothing is as it seems.

Zettel taps into her fantasy roots as she presents the first book in her American Fairy Trilogy [also her first novel for teens]. When I think back to reading this story, I feel overwhelmed actually - there was a lot of stuff going on! I do like the friendship Callie forges with Jack as well as both of their diverse family histories. As for the fairy realm, it will be interesting to see where Zettel takes it in her next installment. The book leaves me wanting to know what happens next. Great read for those who like a little bit of history thrown in with their fantasy. ( )