cover_dustDust, by Arthur Slade • Wendy Lamb Books, 2003.

So much for judging a book by its cover! I picked up Dust expecting Steinbeck, and I got Ray Bradbury instead (though at second glance, that iridescent butterfly should have clued me in that something more-than-naturalism was afoot). The book was, for lack of a better word, mesmerizing. I picked it up intending to kill a few minutes reading the first couple of pages, and didn’t look up again until I’d swallowed it whole.

The story follows Robert, a young boy in rural Saskatchewan whose younger brother Michael disappears mysteriously one morning while walking to town alone. Michael’s disappearance is sudden and traumatic, but after the arrival of a mysterious stranger, Robert’s parents — along with most of the other adults in town — become oddly passive, eventually seeming to forget Michael entirely.

The book’s atmosphere aptly captures the somnambulant horror of the adults’ passivity, and Robert’s imaginative and far-seeing sense of the true dangers at play. As a reader, I sympathized with Robert’s lonely pursuit of truth, and loved the way he seemed, at times, to see the symbolic truth of the world, rather than the literal reality around him.

Children (and adults) who enjoy the magical prairie realism of Ray Bradbury or the spooky small town stories of John Bellairs will love Dust. I could see recommending this book to children as young as ten, though I imagine it finding its broadest audience in 7th graders on up to highschoolers.