“And I really began to want to write a quintessentially American novel about some story of lost history that I thought would be as emotional and as inspiring as ‘The Nightingale.’” “In my travels after that book and talking to people, I really began to understand how much that story of female courage and women’s lost history resonated with people,” Hannah says. 2, won’t be able to imagine this story told any other way, so strong a character is Elsa as she fights for survival and finds her own strength in a tale that reaches from the Dust Bowl to the migrant camps of California’s Central Valley in the mid-1930s.įor Hannah, that vindicates the decision to place Elsa at the center of the story, which like her 2015 bestseller “The Nightingale,” a novel about the women of the French Resistance during World War II, focuses on an epic story about women set against the backdrop of history. An immensely satisfying book.It is likely that readers of “The Four Winds,” which arrived on Feb. Her usual smooth, taut prose draws a sharp contrast to Steinbeck’s inimitable style, with its colloquial dialogue, parables, and sometimes lengthy sentence constructions.
The Four Winds has considerable historical overlap with John Steinbeck’s classic, The Grapes of Wrath, yet bestselling author Kristin Hannah puts her own stamp on human suffering of Great Depression-era migrants. Elsa and Loreda meet an organizer who helps them realize the time has come because “The four winds have blown us here, people from all across the country, to the very edge of this great land…”Įlsa’s and Loreda’s characters are developed masterfully as they toil together through one heart-wrenching scene after another in a relationship that arcs from unconditional mother-child love to teenage withdrawal, to a common fight for survival and, finally, to the bonding of their convictions. Conditions are hopeless unless the workers, whom Elsa has come to admire, band together. But unscrupulous growers exploit Central Valley workers, wringing labor out of malnourished migrants for meager wages, leaving them impoverished and beholden, scorned by native Californians. Elsa has no choice but to take her two children to California in search of work in the cotton fields and a better life.
Life is hard work, but they have fully stocked shelves for over a decade until drought and dust storms ravage the land, when Rafe abandons Elsa and their two children, Loreda and Ant.ĭesperate struggles against nature are portrayed with harrowing images of devastation, dire perils, and death. She ends up pregnant and is taken in to marry Rafe by his kindly immigrant farmer parents.
During the 1920s, Elsa’s Texas Panhandle family smothers her as a fragile outcast until she rebels to experience life with Rafe, a farmer.
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