REVIEW:

Four things you’ll want to do after finishing The Four Winds:

1. Drink a ginormous glass of water. Kristin Hannah has created such a vivid portrait of the American Dust Bowl in the 1930s that you can almost feel the dirt in the back of your throat. It’s hard to imagine the ground being so dry and the weather so ferocious that you could catch dust pneumonia, yet you’ll believe it after only a few pages.

2. Look up photos of the farmers and migrants of the era. You can probably close your eyes and easily picture the famous “Migrant Mother” portrait taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936, but it took me reading this book to really grasp the helplessness of her situation.

3. Hug your mom. The relationships between our heroine Elsa and the women above and below her on her family tree are touching and unexpected. The ties that bind them together are at turns solid as the ground beneath them or frail as the animals on their land.

4. Read everything Kristin Hannah has ever written. I’m one of the rare souls who didn’t adore her WWII novel, The Nightingale, but The Four Winds has solidified her “must read” author status with me once and for all.

I’m grateful to St. Martin’s Press and Ms. Hannah for the opportunity to read and review a gifted advanced copy via NetGalley.

PUBLISHER SYNOPSIS:

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Great Alone comes an epic novel of love and heroism and hope, set against the backdrop of one of America’s most defining eras—the Great Depression.

Texas, 1934. Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up, and dust threatens to bury them all. One of the darkest periods of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl era, has arrived with a vengeance.

In this uncertain and dangerous time, Elsa Martinelli—like so many of her neighbors—must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or go west, to California, in search of a better life. The Four Winds is an indelible portrait of America and the American Dream, as seen through the eyes of one indomitable woman whose courage and sacrifice will come to define a generation.