This book had me in tears several times! Kristin Hannah books have a tendency to do that to me, and it was fun explaining to my kids why tears were spurting out of my eyes randomly today! The Four Winds is quite a gorgeous novel, a near perfect mix of family, devastating trauma, travel, history, and strength. Once you start you won’t be able to put it down!

Elsa Martinelli spends most of her teens being shut out and put down by her family, until she makes a choice that finds her thrown into a completely different life, that of a farmer’s wife in the Great Plains of Texas. There are years of abundance, followed by years of drought, of dust storms, and of pain, and Elsa finds herself at a crossroads where she must choose whether to leave, and follow the roads to California, or to stay and face a long, slow, dusty death. 

This is a part of history that I haven’t really studied as much in depth as I have others, and I found Elsa’s story super insightful. Of course we have all seen photos of the Depression: images of dire poverty and of helplessness, but also images of strength and resolve. I love how the author took this very dark period in US history and turned the story of one family into the story of many. While California seemed to promise a step out of poverty, migrants instead found themselves in the same dire situations as they had at home, except this time without even a roof over their heads. This, in addition to the fact that California residents treated the migrants terribly, farm owners/growers used their dire situations as a way to pay them way less than they were worth, and federal relief was an absolute joke, created a deep hole that people could never dig themselves out of.

I know everyone uses The Grapes of Wrath to refer to this period of US history, so it was really nice to read about this time from a woman’s point of view, with several women protagonists. Obviously this is fiction, and there are elements that have been changed/modified in order to fit the narrative better, but all in all it works really, really well. There are a few areas where I wish the author had dug into a little deeper (the period of abundance is swept over, and I really wouldn’t have mind if the novel had been longer and contained a little more backstory on Elsa’s first years of marriage, and I would have loved to have more information on how things changed after the strikes and riots in California), but overall this is a really great read. If you love historical fiction this is definitely one for the TBR!

And, because of everything that happened in 2020 (and that is still happening today), it is really interesting to read about this period of dark history during another piece of what will soon be also considered dark history.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.