Intense, real and absorbing!

The Four Winds: A Novel by Kristin Hannah       

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Not since The Grapes of Wrath have I been so realistically immersed in such a time of hardships as the Great Depression and droughts of the Dust Bowl areas of the 1930’s. Told from a woman’s point of view, I found Elsa Wolcott’s story inspirational.

The trials of an undervalued, unloved girl, who painfully finds life and purpose is only the beginning.

The introduction focuses on the loneliness of Elsa within her family, the role they’ve colluded to keep her in, unwittingly or not, leaving Elsa stunted by their unyielding perception of her.
Her one moment of fight for freedom, the making of a dress in rose silk, leads to something else. A small but devastatingly painful vignette. I must admit when I saw the silk dress reemerge in a different guise I was shocked. Nothing said stay in your alloted place as did that symbolic moment. Elsa was not allowed to be more. When she was shown attention, of course she gravitated towards it. She was thirsty. This in turn leads to being cast out from her family into a new one.

Set in Texas, Elsa now a Martinelli cleaves to her new family. Their joys are hers and when the continuous drought tuns the Texas panhandle into a dust bowl, she fights on.

Elsa’s story gives insights into the spirit of many of the women of the time despite the meanness of comfortable fearful and their lip service to Christian charity. Others are supportive, and nowhere more so than the women in the shanty camps of California

The dust bowl descriptions of the destructive dirt winds are harrowing. A manmade climate crisis that continues to haunt the past and mirror the future. Turning cows milk brown is just one. The threat of dust pneumonia another. Birds falling from the sky, animals and people painfully depleted.

When Elsa and her children leave for the promise of a golden Californian future, the bad had turned to worse.

Fear and greed is the Californian face. Elsa and her family make friends, meet with ridicule and hatred and become employment fodder for merciless cotton kings. Chewed up and spat out.

The influx of peoples referred to as the Okies was mammoth. Desperation and competition vied as government assistance was withdrawn. Any jobs the people did get were poorly paid and then wages were slashed for profit. The shameful practice of having pickers being economically beholden to the company, where the company charges rent and pays in chits that can only be redeemed in the company store, was rife. Families could never get out from under their debt. Children joined the picker lines. This was enforced labor. The Okies were economical slave labor. The choices were live or die.

Elsa is a warrior. Her trials in Texas were almost unbearable, and yet the California experience trumps even that. She is a woman with a fierce heart when it counts. Her meeting with a communist labor agitator is another turning point.

I was glued to every word. I was equally elated, appalled and devastated,

Hannah is a strong voice speaking into the past and the present. Four Winds has all the earmarks of a classic bringing alive those times for today’s readers, jogging us into reflection and introspection. One can’t help but see parallels between the then and now. 

Her author’s note is a fitting finale.

A St. Martin's Press ARC via NetGalley 

(Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.)