Description: Just as Jeremiah Goodbye is set to meet his fate in the electric chair, a tornado tears down the prison walls, and he is given a second chance at life. With the flip of a coin, he decides to return to his home town of Nowhere, Oklahoma, to settle the score with his twin brother Josiah. But upon his escape, he enters a world he doesn’t recognize—one that has been overtaken by the Dust Bowl. And the gift he once relied on to guide him is as unrecognizable as the path back to Nowhere.
After one jolt in Old Sparky, Jeremiah sees things more clearly and begins to question the mysterious circumstances surrounding the murders he was accused of. On his journey home, he accidentally rescues a young boy who follows him the rest of the way, and the pair arrive at their destination where they are greeted by fearful townspeople. When the Black Sunday storm hits the very next day, the residents of Nowhere finally begin to let the past few years of hardship bury them under the weight of all that dust.
Unlikely heroes, Jeremiah and his new companion, Peter Cotton, try to protect the townspeople from themselves, but Jeremiah must face his nightmares and free himself from the guilt of flipping the coin on those men who died.
Filled with mystery and magic, What Blooms from Dust is the story of finding hope in the midst of darkness and discovering the beauty of unexpected kindness.
My Thoughts: This book started off really well. Markert has way of writing that brings the early nineteen hundreds to life, as though the photographs in textbooks started moving. Jeremiah Goodbye's first glance of the Dust Bowl felt like our first glance of it too, while his initial quirky demeanor had me guessing just how reliable of a narrator he was. And since this story has a supernatural twist, that uncertainty made it all the better.
But then Jeremiah made it back to Nowhere, and his quirkiness started to disappear. Knowing that he did the things that he did while still sane made it harder to like him or to empathize with his character. Especially when it came to his relationships with his brother and sister-in-law.
There was also a fair bit of repetition, both in word usage and in scenes. There is not a lot happening in Nowhere, other than the characters digging out from their houses and then going to Orion's after dinner. What changes are the conversations that are held at these points, but even those repeated certain stories as though the characters (and the readers) would suddenly understand the significance after the fifth time hearing about Jeremiah's nightmares.
That is not to say that interesting things did not occur. The description of the Dust Bowl and a what it would have been like to live through it were spot on, including the hoards of jackrabbits and insects. But sadly, I did not feel that this book lived up to the expectations I had for a Markert novel.
I have provided an honest review after having received a copy of the book through the Fiction Guild.
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