The Four Winds

I have been a fan of K Hannah’s writing for some time. This book in my very humble opinion wasn’t her best, but in saying that I learnt so much about the Great Depression and the dust bowl of America through the lens of strong women that again it was fascinating and one that I have kept thinking about for months afterwards. I always love her description and sense of place and this book was no exception.

One of the reasons I loved this book is its historically authentic. I is truly one of the most memorable books I have ever read.

1921: Elsa is living in what seems like hell. She’s too old and too ugly for marriage, and her family shows no love or compassion towards her. When Elsa meets Rafe Martinelli one night, it wills her to have some shread of hope. Months later she discovers she is with child and her parents are determined not to have their family name shamed by what they look at as a poor choice by their daughter, they force her to pack her backs and drop her at the Martinelli’s farm and never look back. Though uncertain of how she what her future holds, she does what she has to and embraces her new life as a Martinelli.
Fast forward to 1934: The family farm is in trouble, as is every other farm in Texas. There’s been a drought for four years. Times have changed. Life is getting harder, hope slipping from people’s grasp. Elsa finds herself and her family in a terrifying position. With everything falling apart around her, Elsa is faced with a difficult decision. Leaving all that she knows behind, she embarks on a bigger journey than she could have ever imagined. With barely anything in her pocket, a single mother of two children, Elsa and her small family leave their home in Texas and make the treck out west to California along with so many other people during that time in hopes of a fresh start. Elsa will teach her children many lessons, face many obstacles, and work harder than she ever had in a time in history that tore apart so many lives. Will Elsa be able to change the future for her family?
I am honestly not even sure where to begin. I am so blow away by what I just read. We all learned about the Great Depression in school and the Dust Bowl. I knew it was bad. This book just captures so much of what people endured in a way that almost makes you feel as though you were living it right on with them. I don’t think I’ve ever read something so powerful. Bringing us through The Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, the struggle many Americans endured, the fall of so many hopes and dreams, this book is very captivating and tells a story of bravery, strength, and perseverance. This book should be a staple in classrooms. Reading this really hits you hard knowing the struggles this country is currently undergoing. I rate this
Kristin Hannah

Great book but very hard read.

This is only second Kristin Hannah book and I have to give this 4 1/2 stars rounded down to 4. As always the writing was wonderful but I thought parts of the story were a little slow and sometimes a little wordy. I am enjoying books that give a little history in a fictional format and believe these books are becoming one of my favorite genres. I enjoyed the characters in the book and how well some went from riches to rags and adapted and became loved and part of their new family. So difficult to read about all the loss and hardship and then to research and know it was exactly like this in reality. Having lived in modern day Texas, I can appreciate how difficult all the dryness and baroness must have been. I know there were times even in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s in Dallas that we were asked to keep our water consumption down to avoid a complete drought. This book did have it all….family, friendship, romance, suspense, drama, history and an idea of what the journey from Texas to California would have been like in the early 1930’s. I had no idea that California had been less than welcoming to those migrating and in fact were hostile and used some pretty derogatory terms for them. No spoilers but this book is something for everybody and I would highly recommend it.

The story opens in 1921 in Dahlhart, Texas, on the eve of Elsa Woolcott’s twenty-fifth birthday. She has spent “years in enforced solitude, reading fictional adventures and imagining other lives.” She knows she has “always been an outsider in her own family,” even though they blame her circumstances on the childhood illness she survived. She also knows — and they have reinforced — that she is not pretty. She is tall, pale, thin, and lacking self-confidence, but determined to have a meaningful life, rather than merely exist. And she naively believes she might be able to fulfill that dream when she meets Rafe Martinelli, a young man from a proud Italian family who is bound for college and engaged to another young woman. Elsa believes she has found love, but soon discovers how little she knows about life and the world. When her relationship with Rafe can no longer remain hidden, she is disowned and abandoned by her own family, and Rafe’s college plans are scuttled. But before they marry, Elsa asks if Rafe’s parents, Rose and Tony, will love her child. When Rose declares, “The baby, I will love. My first grandchild,” Elsa knows that for the sake of her child, she will become part of a disappointed family that doesn’t want her.

Rose and Tony gradually take Elsa, along with her daughter, Loreda, and son, Anthony (“Ant”), into their hearts. Rose teaches Elsa how to cook and tend to a home, and Elsa tries to hold her marriage together as her love for her in-laws, the land, and the true home she has come to know, grows.

But by 1934, the family has endured four years of drought. Coupled with the stock market crash in 1929 and ensuing Depression, they are barely surviving. Their wheat crops have failed, the well is drying up, and Rafe is increasingly miserable . . . and drinking. The dust storms begin, obliterating everything in their path, including the vegetables they have managed to grow in their garden. They console themselves with the belief that so long as cows and chickens thrive, they can get by selling milk and eggs.

Hannah compellingly and unsparingly relates the family’s increasingly dire circumstances. Her descriptions of the brutal dust storms are realistic and terrifying. She convincingly depicts teen Loreda’s growing anger and resentfulness, as well as the desperation that inevitably overtakes Elsa, Tony, and Rose. They watch as their neighbors begin losing their land via foreclosure or selling it off for any price, along with their possessions, and leaving their Texas homes in search of better living conditions. Many head to California, some to Oregon.

But the Martinellis remain convinced that they can, quite literally, weather the storms and rain will come, bringing solutions to their problems. It doesn’t. Things continually get worse until there is no choice to be made. Silicosis — dust pneumonia — threatens Ant’s life. The doctor explains, “Prairie dust is full of silica. It builds up in the lungs and tears away the air sacs. He’s breathing in dirt and swallowing it. Filling up with it.” The boy literally cannot breathe. “Dust pneumonia. That was what they called it, but it was really loss and poverty and man’s mistakes,” Hannah writes.

Hannah’s portrayal of Elsa’s dangerous journey west to California, where she believes she will be able to make a decent home for herself and her children, is gut-wrenching, suspenseful, and heartbreaking. Elsa’s grit and focus compel her as she navigates the dangerous route with her children in tow. The harrowingly disappointing realities she confronts when they arrive in the Golden State are even more devastating. It is far from the “land of milk and honey” promised in the flyer a neighbor pressed into Rafe’s hand, declaring, “Jobs for everyone! Land of opportunity! Go West to California!” Californians do not welcome those migrating from the Dust Bowl, instead taking full advantage of them and forcing them to barely eke out an existence in deplorable and inhuman living conditions. Elsa soon realizes that she has brought her children to an environment even worse than the one they escaped in Texas. But in the migrant camp where they take up residence, she does find a friend upon whom she can rely, and the way the women help and support each other is one of the most beautiful and tragic aspects of the story. That friendship profoundly impacts Elsa and the choices she ultimately makes.

The Four Winds is an engrossing work of historical fiction at the center of which is the memorable and inspiring Elsa, a woman who finds strength she never knew she possessed and summons it in order to protect the two things in the world that matter most: her children. Made to believe that she was unworthy of love by her own family, Elsa learned as a child to be invisible in her own home. And as she enters into marriage with Rafe, she does so intending to remain invisible. But she is transformed once she becomes a mother and as merely staying alive becomes more challenging with each new day. As is her daughter, who finds her own strength as she gradually stops blaming Elsa for every horrible thing she has experienced and observes the lengths to which her mother will go in order to protect her and her brother.

Hannah does not shy away from exploring, through her characters’ experiences, how America created and responded to the Great Depression. She depicts the struggles between classes, especially once Elsa and her children arrive in California. Migrants are denied medical care and education. Elsa and other workers are taken advantage of by wealthy landowners who hire laborers to pick cotton under terms that ensure they will never be independent. In order to secure a place to live and be able to feed her children, Elsa is forced to accept credit, but it creates a cycle from which she cannot escape. She must rely on more credit during the winter months when there are no crops to pick in order to pay off the prior year’s balance, unable to ever escape the cycle. Union organizers bring hope for better working and living conditions, along with danger to the camps. Elsa finds herself in the midst of the controversy and realizes that her grandfather was right when he told her so many years earlier that it isn’t fear that matters in life. It’s the choices you make when you are afraid. Elsa’s journey and experiences lead her to conclude that she has to be a warrior for her children because that’s what motherhood requires. And she has to tangibly model for them the lesson her grandfather taught her. It’s a life-changing decision.

The Four Winds is an epic tale of power, strength, survival, and how far love can and will carry a determined woman who envisions a meaningful life for herself and her children. In Hannah’s capable telling of Elsa’s story, love carries her through and out of unimaginable despair and hopelessness, and permits her to leave her children an enduring legacy devotion and resilience.

Hannah says that she began writing historical fiction out of a “desire to return women to their lost stories in history, put them at the center of the action, and make them the heroes.” Elsa is Hannah’s favorite character to date because she transforms from an insecure woman who, at the outset, doesn’t believe she is worthy of love or has a vibrant future, progressing primarily as a result of becoming a mother into “a warrior woman who is able to fight not only for herself and her children, but finally finds a voice strong enough to speak for people who are too afraid to speak for themselves.” Hannah describes fictional Elsa as “representative of thousands of brave women who went west in search of a better life.” Elsa is indeed a heroic character that readers will embrace and remember fondly long after they finish reading The Four Winds.

Thanks to NetGalley for an Advance Reader’s Copy of the book.

This book had wonderful characters…..It’s a piece of our history that Kristin Hannah as usual… brings to life with the truth & fiction. I had such deep feelings for what our ancestors had to face with nature against them, and they did it with dignity!

Superb. Gives reader such a compassionate understanding of this part of our history. I appreciate the gift of images of real people affected and of their survival skills and humans who care the way we all should. I Listened on audio. Narrator was fabulous also. Only wish the profanity wasn’t included. I know it’s realistic for the characters, but the book would have been just as fabulous without it.

AMAZING Book!!

Hannah has crafted an epic drama of hardship and the indomitable spirit of the American people. Set in the 1930’s during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. It’s an emotional read.

NOTE: Profanity and intimate scenes.

I borrowed a copy from my local library. I’ve expressed my honest opinion.