Review by astoriareader - The Four Winds

challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

SYNOPSIS:

It is the 1920s in a small farming community in the Texas Panhandle. Elsa Martinelli grew up in a wealthy family, who never appreciated her & make her feel hard to love. At age 25, she hooks up with Rafe, and she winds up pregnant. They get married, and she moves in with Rafe and his parents, Rosa and Tony, on their farm.
Fast forward, it is 1930s. Along the stock market crash & The Great Depression, there are also several years of drought and The Dust Bowl. Elsa has two kids now, Ant & Lareda, and with no end in sight to the dust storms, Elsa abandon their home and flee to California where they hope work and a better life await. The book details what happens when the family arrives in California.

MY THOUGHTS

As my first read of 2024, I wanted to start off with a book by one of my favorite authors. This marks the fourth book I’ve read by Hannah, with the others being: The Great Alone, The Women, The Nightingale.
Hannah is an expert at character development & writing strong female characters. I always learn something when reading her historical fictions. In this one, I learned a lot that I didn’t know about the Dust Bowl & migrants.
I thoroughly enjoyed the bonds that develop among the characters in the book, and the imagery and vivid descriptions of the surroundings were also very well done.
It is definitely a sweeping story, and it is a hard one to read.
My only complaint about the book is all the characters were white, and I would have enjoyed different perspectives about the experiences of BIPOC folks.
Kudos to Hannah for clearly spending a lot of time researching the era & the topics covered in the book.

TL;DR: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️historical fiction with strong women as main characters. time period: Dust Bowl.

Content Warnings