Out of the Storm

by Patricia Willis

Book Overview

In 1946, a year after Mandy's father died in World War II, Mandy, her mother, and her younger brother Ira move in with stern Aunt Bess on her northern Ohio sheep farm. Desperate to hold on to the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 039568708X
• ISBN13: 9780395687086
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Clarion Books
• Length: 188 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.6"
• Age Range: 10 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 5 to 7

Customer Reviews

Poignant portrait of grief

The surface of this book deals with a girl's struggle over her family's relocation to a rural area, and the loss of her dream of remaining in her home town, but its deeper currents deal with the difficulty she, her mother, and her brother have in dealing with her father's death in action in World War Two. Her brother clings to hope that the father somehow survives in hiding somewhere, her mother is overwhelmed by angry feelings of abandonment and desperation to find a way to support her children, and the main character, Mandy, clings to her father's dream of buying a neighbor's house in the original home town. Through her experiences with local school children, the strict great aunt with whom they live in the rural area, and her growing attachment to the herd of sheep she tends after school Mandy comes to terms with her own grief and begins to accept her mother's and brother's confused anguish as well. In the process she grows up a little, and begins to understand why relocation, however painful, is the only way to support the family.