1987 Honor - A Fine White Dust

I wasn’t sure that I wanted to write a review on Cynthia Rylant’s “A Fine White Dust.” I had picked it up (at a thrift store), read it, put the title and cover picture in the blog as a draft, and then just left it alone for a long time. Wasn’t it a good book? After all, it received the Newbery Honor prize. For one thing, it wasn’t my style of enjoyable reading. It was very “meaningful,” and felt a little disturbing to me. But as I told my kids when they were in school and sometimes resisted those sorts of book assignments, wanting to stay in the fast & fun novel category, I said that it was the “meaningful” books that they would remember. 

“A Fine White Dust” is a short little book, coming in at just over a hundred pages and can be read in under an hour. The subject is religion, but the theme of the book is about betrayal and a sensitive adolescent boy’s efforts to find meaning in life and work out his value system.

Pete is a spiritual boy who connects with that part of himself through going to church and feeling love for Jesus. It disturbs him that his parents are not church-goers, even though they put no obstacles in his way for attending, and that his best friend, Rufus, is an avowed atheist, even though Rufus doesn’t mind Pete being religious. In the middle of Pete’s growing concern over the state of their souls, the Preacher Man comes to town to hold a revival, consisting of evening evangelistical church services held over several days. 

The Preacher Man is a charismatic guy with a compelling and enthralling personality. Pete first sees him at the side of the road, hitchhiking, and he feels an instant reaction, imagining him to be an axe murderer. When Pete attends the church meeting and sees that the hitchhiker is actually the revival preacher, that intensity of feeling turns into an infatuation, a crush on the man. Pete throws his loyalty, affection, and sympathies to “The Man,” as he internally refers to him, going into full-blown hero worship, turning away from his best friend and his parents who create conflict with his new-born feelings. 

The Man, however, is a charlatan, and Pete himself is betrayed. The people who are real in his life, his parents and Rufus, are there to support him as he recovers from his personal trauma. Pete learns that he can’t take any of them for granted, and that they love him by choice, and that they will stick by him.

One thing I was reminded of, in reading this book, is that communication can be difficult, especially for a child or adolescent. Pete finds it hard to communicate his spiritual feelings and growth to his parents and Rufus. Parents should know or remember how shy and squirmy kids can be about initiating or responding to conversations about religion, inner feelings, sex, dreams and goals, and embarrassing things. One thing in the book that is alluded to, but never explained is some past and personal experience Pete’s parents had with church or religion. Perhaps if that had been a conversation they had been able to initiate with him, some of Pete’s problems might have been avoided.

A word of reassurance, even though the Preacher Man seems a little creepy in his attention to Pete, there is no overt reference to “that sort” of an inappropriate relationship.