“My family came to Colorado for land, cheap, advertised along with an old farmhouse in one of the newsletters my dad would read. The newsletters taught how to live simply, told him to do more with less. Go back to the land, the newsletters urged, with their talk of earthworms for composting, woodstoves for heat. And so we went back, back to a place we had never been.”

With that, 16-year-old Thea Taylor introduces her family to the readers of Alison Stine’s Young Adult novel Dust. For this teenager, the story’s protagonist, it’s a dismal existence. Uprooted from their home in Ohio when a flood destroyed most of what they owned, Thea, her little sister, Amelia, and their parents traveled to their new life on a parched piece of land. It would be a new beginning, in southeast Colorado’s dry, dusty, mostly treeless Bloodless Valley.

During the Covid pandemic, their father had become increasingly anxious and paranoid, stockpiling food, supplies and even guns. He worried about raising his children in what he saw was a dangerous society, so he pulled Thea and Amelia out of school. “Better to never send us back,” Thea remembers. “Better to try this new idea, which was actually an old one. Unschooling. Homesteading. Working the land and doing it alone. Not contributing to the ‘grinding machine of capitalism,’ he said, quoting.”

Never mind that they had never lived in a dry, dusty climate like this one. In Ohio, they frequented farmers markets to sell homemade jam and vegetables they had grown in the fertile soil. In the Bloodless Valley, with its sand and wind and relentless sunshine, it was different. “My dad doesn’t really know how to farm here,” Thea blurts out when she meets a new person in the tiny town near their property.

Thea’s mom has found a job at the grocery store in town, and Thea helps out at the tiny diner next door. There’s a library, a post office and a highway slicing through. “In Colorado, the town felt as small as a speed bump, buildings spread far apart on the plain, unending road,” Thea says. “My mom and I went to the cafe, to the store that sold damaged goods at a discount to farmers like my dad, and to our home: that skeletal ranch.”

Thea’s isolation is due to more than geography or even the lack of social interaction in her life. She is hard of hearing and author Stine illustrates that in Dust by using underlined blank spaces instead of words in sentences that Thea hears partially. It’s an effective way of showing how Thea interacts with her world and a metaphor for how she feels—often distant and left out.

Thea’s father won’t talk about his daughter’s hearing problem, and he has isolated her in other ways as well. He has the family’s only cellphone and, because they don’t pay their bill, it is shut off. There is no TV or radio in their home. When they aren’t working on the farm, Thea and her sister learn from antiquated home-schooling books and they aren’t allowed to visit the town’s library or use the internet there.

“In a way, I thought, living alone might have been easier than my type of alone,” Thea says. “At least living solo, you might know what you were up against: loneliness rolling on like the highway.”

But Thea finds allies. Louisa, the kind owner of the café; Captain, the bow-tied librarian; and Sam, a long-timer who tells Thea he is a “sort of outreach for the county; I go around seeing if families need anything.” And then there is Ray, Sam’s great-nephew. He visits from Denver during the summer months and he meets Thea at the library. Ray, she discovers, is also deaf, but he knows sign language. She is floored. “I was like Ray. Here, in this tiny town in the desert, was the first person I had met who was deaf like me.”

With the help of her new friends, Thea begins studying at the library and learning sign language from Ray, who has quickly become the most important person in her life. Reading about the Dust Bowl and Black Sunday, the day in 1935 when a devastating dust storm stretched hundreds of miles from Colorado eastward, she has a premonition that the relentless wind and red dust will soon engulf everything again.

Dust is a compelling tale: a sweet romance, a retelling of the Dust Bowl days and a story of survival and discovery, community and family. In her clandestine library reading, Thea learns about climate change and other life-altering environmental hazards.

Stine is a prolific poet, essayist, novelist, playwright and former staff culture writer at Salon. She grew up in Ohio and now lives in Colorado. In this book, her third novel, she paints a picture of a place that is hard and unforgiving but also beautiful. “The longer I looked, the more I noticed what was alive in the desert,” Thea says. “Rabbits hid in the sedge. Chipmunks would scurry along the ground, their wiggling plump bellies the same color as the earth. Dragonflies twisted in the air and occasionally a hummingbird buzzed by like a doorbell. Or a magpie catapulted through the sky. The natural world unfolded like a hand.”

Stine also offers readers thoughtful metaphors —the wind, as relentless as Thea’s father; the library, a shelter from ignorance and from the weather; the isolation from the rest of the world and, for Thea, from hearing people.

Through it all, Stine allows the wind and dust to blow from the very first page. “I saw the dust before the truck, before I could hear its motor,” Thea says. “A cloud like a dragon tearing down the road, the dust looking majestic, a plume of brown fire, because the highway was flat.”