Last year, I tried to read The Great Alone (2017) by Kristin Hannah. But about 80 pages in “the book wasn’t booking,” as they say on TikTok. However, I know what a popular and acclaimed author Kristin Hannah is, so this year I decided to give The Four Winds (2021) a try.
And at first, when I started reading The Four Winds, I worried that my lukewarm experience with The Great Alone was about to repeat itself. Elsa Martinelli’s life growing up in the 1920s Texas Panhandle didn’t interest me at first. I felt bad for Elsa, a shy young woman living in the shadow of her two younger and more popular sisters, but I had yet to feel that spark I look for in a novel.
But I read on. Elsa marries Rafe Martinelli and moves to Lonesome Tree, TX, where her in-laws, Tony and Rose, own a small but successful farm. Rafe and Elsa have two children, and Elsa, having been raised in a town, actually enjoys farming. She never wants or expects to leave Lonesome Tree.
But it is now the 1930s, and a terrible drought has descended on the Great Plains. Lonesome Tree, located in the Texas Panhandle, is one of the worst places to be when the dust storms descend. The Four Winds really took off for me at that point.
I learned so much about the Dust Bowl era: the people who went through it and the politics of that decade. The way the migrants fleeing starvation and dust storms in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, etc were treated when they arrived in California. The union organizers, the vigilantes, the impact of the Communist Party, and FDR’s relief efforts—are all captured in The Four Winds.
And above all, The Four Winds is the story of Elsa Martinelli and her family. Her teenage daughter, Lareda; her seven-year-old son, Anthony and her in-laws, Tony and Rose, who are the parents to Elsa that her own parents never were.
Tony and Rose decide to remain in Texas and ride out the drought and the dust storms. Elsa and her children choose to join the migration to California, and the book left me with a question: Is it better to stay or to go when times get tough? It’s complicated.
I don’t want to over-talk The Four Winds. But it is one of the best books I will read this year and Julia Whelan is an excellent audio reader. I think I have found my definitive historical novel about the Dust Bowl era with the exception, maybe, of The Grapes of Wrath.
5 Stars
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