Historical Fiction; Coming-of-Age; Young Adult Literature
Out of the Dust is set in a real place during a real time in history when real stuff went down—but it's also fictional, since Billie Jo and her family are figments of Hesse's imagination. This means we're definitely in the land of historical fiction, Shmoopsters.
While sometimes coming of age novels foreground the main character's shift from childhood to adulthood, and Billie Jo is definitely not all the way grown up by the time this book ends, we're still calling it a coming of age story because our main girl grows up so much. Not only does she lose her mother, but she does some serious inventory taking when it comes to herself and her life, and she is markedly more mature by the time the book ends. In other words, while she may have a ways to go yet before she's a full-on adult, Billie Jo covers some serious terrain.
Nothing says young adult lit quite like a fourteen-turned-fifteen-year-old main character. Heck—we're even reading her diary. And no teenager wants adults reading their diary, right? So suffice it to say that this book was definitely written for a young adult audience… or at least for young adults at heart.