A Fine White Dust

A FINE WHITE DUST is one of Rylant's older, lesser-known works, resurrected for this audio production. Thirteen-year-old Pete is "best friends with an atheist," and his parents are only "half-washed Christians," but he has a religious "itch" that needs scratchin'. It's the summer the Preacher Man arrives in his small town for a series of revival meetings. Keith Nobbs tells Pete's story with the exaggerated, enthusiastic lilt of a revivalist preacher as Pete finds a balm for his itch. Nobbs fills Pete's voice with awe as he attempts to make sense of "being saved" and comes to terms with the value of faith, friends, and family. N.E.M. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

February 1, 1987
Pete is 13 the summer the Preacher Man comes to his small town, vulnerable with both adolescent yearning and the need to find religious fulfillment. His parents are lapsed church-goers, who neither share nor encourage their son's deeper convictions. The Preacher Man, with mesmerizing blue eyes, is a traveling evangelist who holds revivalist meetings in Pete's town that summer; Pete finds in him a companion who can understand his feelings about God without speaking a word. As the Preacher Man takes on Christ-like proportions in his mind, Pete decides to travel with the man when he leaves town. Pete waits for him all night, his bags packed, feeling as if he were called to this journey. But Rufus, his best friend and a confirmed atheist, is the one who tells Pete that the Preacher Man has run off with a woman. A year later, Pete understands that the Preacher Man's fallibility was of this earth, not to be confused with a betrayal by God. Rylant's writing is deceptively simple, creating an emotional whirlpool for the reader that is not unlike Pete's own experience. Her characters are adults and teenagers who are neither good nor bad, but richly, heartbreakingly human.

The first-person young adult novel demands a reader who can convincingly deliver narrative in a creditable teenaged voice. In A FINE WHITE DUST, Jeff Woodman does an admirable job of speaking to the listener through the voice of 13-year-old Peter Cassidy. In a Southern drawl, Woodman relates the story of the summer Peter was "saved" by the Preacher Man, who claimed to have come to town to rescue souls. Instead he worked his hypnotic holy magic on Peter, ensnaring him in a trap of counterfeit religious lust. A residue of pious intensity sings in Woodman's voice as Peter remembers his time with the Preacher, trying to create meaning from it, for his reader and for himself. T.B. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine