Matt Phelan's sketches are what really tell the story. In the Author's Note Phelan says, "It was the faces. Against a backdrop of a vanishing farmland, these faces stared at the camera with haunting directness." He was speaking of photography from Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, but it's his sketches that have the same effect in The Storm in the Barn.The faces of the men who have nothing else to do but play dominoes at the town store, the faces of Jack's parents as they struggle to provide and care for three children, the faces of the town bullies after they partake in a jackrabbit drive - all of them hint at the plight of real people.
