David Booth’s The Dust Bowl gives young readers a striking view of a Depression-era prairie farm. As the story opens (in what seems to be the 1970s) Matthew’s grandfather, a survivor of the “Big Dry,” is reassuring his son and grandson about a recent drought on the family farm, certain that the land will endure, having weathered much worse, decades ago. Matthew’s father, anxious about the future, doesn’t want to hear about the past, and leaves the oldest and youngest generations to commune.

It is in the grandfather’s voice that Booth’s sharpest and most evocative writing comes through. Details bring the period to life: a wind so fierce it blows for two weeks, breaking windows and flattening the odd barn; children walking to school backwards so the grit won’t fly into their eyes, noses, and mouths; grasshoppers descending like a biblical plague and stopping trains with their bodies – greasing the tracks so completely the engines can get no traction. Booth also captures the isolation of the farm. An impassable winter road severs all ties with the outside world, neighbours gradually leave, exhausted by the struggle, buildings are abandoned and schools closed, and the whistles of westbound trains remind Matthew’s grandfather of escape.

Karen Reczuch’s sun-bleached, dusty colours complement Booth’s text perfectly, and she conjures up the modern-day and Depression-era farms – and the expanse of the Prairies – with equal ease. Her little touches are especially sensitive, such as the faint tic-tac-toe sketched in the dust of the kitchen table. She creates a trio of photos to give Matthew’s mother and grandmother a visual presence (both characters have died before the story begins but are repeatedly referred to by the all-male household) as well as a marvellous “close-up” of a devouring grasshopper, one emblem of the disastrous decade. The only dissonant image is Matthew’s grandmother watering her garden’s parched earth while barefoot (earlier, the grandfather says, “It was hot enough to fry your shoes”) while dazzlingly white laundry flaps on the line (despite an accompanying passage that says, “Your grandma could never get the laundry white. The curtains and sheets were as grey as the sky”). But this is a quibbling criticism of an otherwise enjoyable book.