Dust Girl by Sarah Zettel

Callie is living in Kansas during the Dust Bowl.  She and her mother run a hotel.  Her mother refuses to leave, even though almost everyone else has.  Callie's mother swears that some day, Callie's father will come back for them, so they're staying right there.  Then one day, during a terrible dust storm, Callie's mother disappears, and Callie learns who her father really is.

I'm not ruining anything but saying that Callie realizes she's half fairy.  You learn it pretty quickly.  Her father never came back because he's a fairy prince being held captive because he wants to return to his mortal wife but his family wants him to marry some princess.  As always, there are the good fairies and the bad faeries, but even the good faeries aren't all that good, and everyone speaks in riddles and it's hard to get a straight answer out of anyone. 

Callie sets off to find her mother, and she's joined by Jack, a hobo, and we later learn, a Jew, which gets you kicked out of just as many places as being Black does.

It was draggy.  There was a lot of exposition and not a lot happening.  I just wasn't that interested.  There was nothing new or exciting being done with the world of fairies.  Callie and Jack are clearly set up to have a romantic relationship somewhere down the line in the series, but they don't have very much chemistry and it just wasn't all that interesting.

Don't really have much else to say about it.  It was fine.  No need to dash out and get it.

Let's talk about the cover.  Callie's father is a black man.  Callie describes her skin as being "cream-colored" but gets darker when she's out in the sun (which she is the whole book).  There's mention of her hair being "coarse."  There's the suggestion that Callie can "pass" for white, but the longer she's on the road, the more she begins to look like her father.  She requires glamours to conceal herself and make her look like a white girl so she can get into places.  I'm not sure this cover is a great representation of Callie. Thoughts?