The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

Set in the Texas Panhandle deep in the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, you can imagine the devastation this read delivers. It is loss after loss for our protagonist, but she is the strongest, most resilient character I’ve met in a long while. Kristin Hannah braids together pieces of America’s history with a fictional story of Elsa Martinelli’s entire life.

We see her work tenaciously against different paths of destiny—thrust upon her by her birth parents, by her husband, by the American government and by Mother Nature herself. It feels like microscopic wins and enormous losses for most of the story, with tiny glimmers of hope that fuel you to the next chapter.

The sense of desperation you develop as the reader sparks an empathy for a time in our country’s history that one just cannot understand if they didn’t live it. It’s a feeling of being so small and powerless and without control of your own future… I can barely imagine.

As fas as the actual composition goes, this is a very easy read. My main criticism is that some sentences could have been cut so as not to over-explain; implication would have made some passages more powerful. The lack of ambiguity makes me think Hannah doesn’t trust her readers to find their own conclusions, which sometimes pulled me out of the story as I found myself rolling my eyes. But, perhaps it’s a stylistic choice. Who am I to say?

All-in-all, this story ended beautifully—in some ways not how you, the reader, wanted it to go, but with an understanding that it sort of had to go that way.

The Four Winds is both brutal & beautiful—be ready for a bumpy ride.