Module 13: The Storm in the Barn by Matt Phelan

The Storm in the Barn by Matt Phelan tells the harrowing story of a young boy during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s in the barren and windswept plains of Kansas.

Summary

Jack is a boy whose family lives on the high plains of Kansas in 1937.  They are poor and their land is destitute. The only thing they have more than enough of is dust and dirt.

Jack is a melancholy character who doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere. He is loyal to his family and helps when and where he can, but his father is so frustrated that he often ignores him or brushes him off as a pest.  He has no playmates except his siblings and the only boys his age around bully him and taunt him.

His only friend works at the store in town. He tells Jack fantastical tales of a boy named Jack who defeats giants and is very brave. Jack longs to be like the Jack in those stories, but he has no confidence in himself.

He struggles to come to terms with the dry, desperate land and comes face to face with the King of Rain in the barn on a neighboring property.  As he does battles with his own demons and the King of Rain, the real rain comes to his family’s land and quenches the angry dust back to the ground.

Impressions

Phelan uses the graphic sketch style in this novel along with shades of grays, browns, and blues.  These tones add to the bleak feeling that comes from the story. The colors become more intense and varied when Jack is imagining things or in the middle of a story.  Phelan explains that the drawings are based on some actual photographs of the time period along with a documentary that he saw.  He succeeds in telling a tale of history from the point of view of a person who might have been there, rather than as an outside observer looking back.  The text is sparse, but the images are dense with meaning and detail.

Professional Reviews

Ten-year-old Jack and his family suffer the hardships of Dust Bowl America, while a secret in the barn may alter their fortunes forever in this superb graphic-novel evocation of childhood’s yearning and triumphs.  Phelan (illustrator of the Higher Power of Lucky, 2006) turns every panel of this little masterpiece into a spare and melancholy window into another era, capturing an unmistakable sense of time and place—as found in James Sturm’s Satchel Paige (2007)—even as he takes full advantage of the medium’s strengths by using fantasy elements to enrich the deep, genuine emotional content, much as Shaun Tan did in The Arrival (2008). All the more impressive is how he balances fleet pacing (thanks to low word density) with a thoughtful, contemplative homage to storytelling and storytellers, which, in the tradition of the greatest tall tales, presents an empowering message that all a child needs to change the world is courage and ingenuity. Great for a wide range of readers, this will work particularly well as a gentle introduction for those new to graphic novels or as an elegant argument on the format’s behalf against dubious naysayers. A single warning: there is a restrained depiction of a rabbit slaughter, which could upset more sensitive readers.

Karp, 2009

It is 1937 in Kansas, during the Dust Bowl, and 11-year-old Jack can barely remember a world with plentiful water and crops. Unable to help his father with a harvest that isn't there, and bullied by the other boys his age, he feels like a useless baby. Stories offer a refuge, and there are multiple stories in this work, Jack's mother tells about the time when the land was a fertile "paradise." Jack's invalid sister, Dorothy, is reading The Wizard of Oz, gaining inspiration from the adventures of another Kansan of the same name. Jack's friend comforts him with folktales about a brave man named Jack who masters nature, battling the King of the West Wind, the King of Blizzards, and the King of the Northeast Winds. In the end, Phelan turns the Dust Bowl into another one of Ernie's "Jack" tales when the real Jack encounters the Storm King in an abandoned barn and finds out that he has been holding back the rain. The boy must then gather the strength to determine his own narrative, as well as his parched town's future. Children can read this as a work of historical fiction, a piece of folklore, a scary story, a graphic novel, or all four. Written with simple, direct language, it's an almost wordless book: the illustrations' shadowy grays and blurry lines eloquently depict the haze of the dust. A complex but accessible and fascinating book.

Goldstein, 2009

Library Uses

I would use this as a book club book for a group of reluctant readers or as a transition for comic readers to get them into graphic novels.

References

Goldstein, L. (2009). The storm in the barn. School Library Journal, 55(9), 190.

Karp, J. (2009). The storm in the barn. Booklist, 105(12), 68.

Phelan, M. (2009). The storm in the barn. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press.