Dust, Philip K. Dick Award-winning author Alison Stine's first YA work, is a powerful coming-of-age novel in which a 16-year-old faces extreme hardships due to her father's desire for a "simpler" life.
After the Covid-19 pandemic and a devastating flood, Thea's family moves from rural Ohio to a remote Colorado valley. Thea's dad, who reads newsletters about living off the grid, "had a vision of the next place": yellow, dry, "westward, sitting at the foot of mountains like a child." Thea and nine-year-old sister Amelia have no access to school, the Internet, or most books, and the family experiences dust storms that are more frequent and intense than any since the 1930s. Thea, who is deaf in one ear, feels isolated in her home where her family ignores her condition. She has never used a hearing aid, learned sign language, or been formally taught lipreading. But then Thea meets Ray, a young man visiting town for the summer who wears hearing aids, knows ASL, and attends a Denver school that educates Deaf students. A friendship between the two leads to a gentle romance and Thea learning skills she can use to become independent.
Stine (Road Out of Winter) effectively represents Thea's deafness and her feeling of detachment by including blank spaces in sentences where she misses words or phrases. Thoughtful readers may be confused by Thea's family's apparent lack of care but will likely respond to her growing independence, her acknowledgment of her deafness, and her desire to change life for herself and the people close to her. This contemplative novel is concerned with climate change and alternative living but, most importantly, with the growth of a strong young woman. --Melinda Greenblatt, freelance book reviewer