The Four Winds

Kristin Hannah

I could do this report in one word: Wow!

I think you’ll probably want more than that, so here goes:

Set in America in the 1930s, Elsa Martinelli, third daughter of a wealthy family is isolated and seemingly despised by her family having been ill as a child. She’s not permitted to do anything much because she ‘was too ill’, then despised her for being weak and looking less attractive than the other girls.

After breaking out one evening, she ends up in disgrace and her parents marry her off to a farming family and shun her. The farmers, take her in and teach her to farm and she spends years becoming the strongest member of the family, trying to earn other people’s love and acceptance because she didn’t believe her own worth.

You’ll often hear me banging on about the formula that most books are written by:  books usually start with a way of introducing the character(s) and then something happens to make them reevaluate their position and try to sort out the problem. Just as they are facing that challenge and going along nicely, something worse happens. They’re at the point of no return where they have to either give up or do something that pushes them to the limit. Everything comes together and they live happily ever after. All good. It’s what we know, expect and are comfortable with.

Kristin Hannah hasn’t received the memo about the formula. She broke the mould. Elsa faces her catastrophe in the first part of the book – tick – then her life gets harder – tick. Then as the in-laws, her, her husband and her children are living a hardworking but sustainable life, the drought and the dust storms start.

I didn’t know anything about the Great Depression or the Dust Bowl before reading this book.

Farming families on the Great Plains had been ruining the topsoil for generations and when the drought came, and the winds got up, there were terrible dust storms that went on for days. The crops died and people and animal stock died through malnutrition and inhalation of dust. The mortgage companies foreclosed on the properties; the people that were able to flee, walked or drove using the last fuel and dollars they possessed to get to California to pick crops.

So many people fled to California that the farmers began to pay less and less and still more people came. There wasn’t enough work, nowhere to live, no benefits for the first year of settling. The employers were cruel and unfair and the people got sick and died in unsanitary conditions on temporary camp sites. Still more people came.

Elsa Martinelli and her two children arrived with very little and their every day got worse. The author gave us a beacon of hope and we all were on the edge of our seat imagining how Hannah would write the happy ending to this beautifully written, heartbreaking story. Then things got worse.

It was a tale of resilience, love and the strong bond that women make with each other. It was tragedy on top of challenge on top of sadness, and it made me silently plead with Kristin Hannah that she was going to give this poor family a break. I won’t spoil it for you by telling what happened to this family as I think you should read it, but suffice to say, Kristin Hannah told this harrowing tale in such a wonderful way and I’d recommend it to you.

Based on the very true story of the Great Depression era in America, and told through the lens of just one of the hundreds of thousands of affected women, I couldn’t put this book down. It’s one of those books you continue to read despite it being an hour past bedtime and you’ll be shattered in the morning. I read this on Kindle, but one of our group listened on Audible and she said the narrator was excellent.

We had all of our members turn up to the meeting which was hosted beautifully by Marie. It was the first time we’ve all been together in a while so it was a lovely catch up.

We all scored this book very highly at 9.8/10, so it now rates as one of our favourites since we started the group.

At the AGM in March, I invited ARWI members to give us book recommendations and we were told ‘anything by Alice Feeney’ so our next book is His and Hers by Alice Feeney. Have a read along and let us know what you think.

Thank you Marie for hosting, thank you ladies for the fabulous feast and thank you all for reading!

Lotsaluv

Sarah

“Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.” —Malorie Blackman