December 2, 2025 by Scholastic Inc.
Copy provided by Young Adult Books Central
Ray lives on a farm in the Texas Panhandle in 1935, during the Great Depression. His best friend, Dolly, frequently accompanies him on his adventures, but things are changing in their small town. The bakery where the two occasionally buy cookies has closed, and many of their classmates in their one room school house have moved to California to pursue better opportunities. Still, there are some boys who show up in the two, having ridden on freight trains away from their own homes. When dust storms arise, Ray and Dolly know to seek shelter, but these storms seem to be becoming more frequent, and the two get caught in town, at school, and at home, where they have to ride out the dust and spend hours cleaning up afterwards. At one point, Ray's father ventures out to check on the chickens, and it is a tense time until he returns. Even with all of the precautions like Vaseline to line their nostrils, wet cloths and even surplus WWI era gas masks to block particulates, and protocols for sheltering in place, many people, including Dolly's brother Skippy, develop "dust pneumonia" and have trouble breathing. When Dolly's family leaves for California and Ray's family is in danger of losing their farm to the bank, Ray decides to strike out on his own, but runs into complications. There is historical information as well as period photographs at the end of the book.
As we approach the 100th anniversary of the 1929 stock market crash, I am glad to see new books on the Great Depression such as Colman's Where Only Storms Grow and Ruiz-Flores' The Pecan Sheller. The books written shortly after this era don't delve as much into the health implications of the dust storms, or the environmental issues that led to the soil erosion and subsequent dust storms. Both of these issues interest my students.
While there were many topics that are frequently covered, like children riding the rails, farms being foreclosed, and the suffocating terror of being caught in a storm. I did learn some new and surprising things, such as the fact that World War I surplus gas masks were distributed to children so that they could breathe somewhat more freely, and the odd occurrence of rain clouds meeting with dust clouds and producing showers of MUD!
The best part of the I Survived books are the historical back matter, which includes period photos and much discussion of a variety of topics. I would have avidly saved my allowance to purchase these titles in elementary school! I always encourage students to further their investigations with nonfiction titles, which in this case would include Brown's The Great American Dust Bowl and Sandler's Picturing a Nation.
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