book review of the four winds by hannah

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‘The Four Winds’ is Kristin Hannah’s next inevitable bestseller. Don’t forget the tissues.

Labor is hot. Look for the union label in the pages of a best-selling novel lately, and you might find it.

Last fall, Jess Walter published “ The Cold Millions ,” a terrific story about union organizers in Spokane, Wash., in the early 20th century. The Washington Post named it one of the top 10 books of 2020 .

And now comes mega-seller Kristin Hannah with “ The Four Winds ,” an emotional novel about efforts to organize migrant workers in California during the Depression.

Admittedly, literary fiction is not the surest bellwether of American cultural attitudes. But with income inequality soaring even as union membership plummets, Walter and Hannah are leading readers back to an era when desperate workers linked arms to fight for their income, their honor, their very lives.

“The Four Winds” begins in northwestern Texas in 1921. Elsa Wolcott is the eldest daughter in a middle-class family that treats her like an ugly heirloom. Her unloving parents keep Elsa cloistered in her room reading, insisting she’s too weak to endure any social interaction. At 25 — a hopeless spinster! — she’s constantly reminded that “no man of note wants an unattractive wife.”

But Elsa is about one strip of yellow wallpaper away from a nervous breakdown. Her heart is a thumping muscle of unsatisfied longings and unrealized ambitions. Like Jane Eyre, she fumes with the exasperation of a passionate woman long dismissed and repressed. “If she didn’t do something soon, something drastic, her future would look no different from her present,” Hannah writes. “She would stay in this house for all her life” with novels as her only friends.

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Inspired by the scandalous story of Fanny Hill, Elsa sews a red dress that shows her knees and storms off for a night of romantic adventure. She gets what she wants — for a few seconds, at least — but it turns out that novels have provided her with a very limited understanding of how sex actually works.

This great storm of sighs and shame is mere introduction designed to transform Elsa from Imprisoned Virgin to Outcast Mother. Expelled from the confines of her bedroom and the enervating control of her parents, she emerges as a classic Hannah heroine girded for the harrowing adventures ahead.

When “The Four Winds” picks up again in 1934, we’re deep in the Great Depression, and Hannah lets her story bake under the cloudless sky. A conspiracy of bad weather, bad agriculture and bad government gradually desiccates the entire area, bringing one farm after another to ruin.

The evaporation of water, the withering of seedlings, the boredom of unemployment — such calamities are not easy to dramatize, but as the drought grinds on, Hannah makes the heat radiate off these pages. And for sheer physical terror, she swirls up apocalyptic dust storms, ordeals of gritty insistence that last for days, transforming the landscape, burying homes and filling lungs. Faced with the possibility of starvation, Elsa must decide whether to stay on her land or head off to California, that oasis of milk and honey with jobs aplenty.

Clearly, while Elsa was reading “ Sense and Sensibility ,” Hannah was reading “ The Grapes of Wrath .” Elsa keeps reminding people that she’s a Texan, not an Okie, but the echoes of Steinbeck’s classic are sometimes so strong that I expected to see the Joads’ Hudson Super Six chugging along the road. Like Tom and his family, Elsa discovers that the paradise she expected to find is no such thing. California is overwhelmed by impoverished people desperate for work and food. With no safety standards, labor regulations or minimum wage — all those pesky burdens that Republicans are still whining about — giant farm owners are free to treat their laborers as brutally as they want. The country is entranced by the pernicious lie that providing government aid would weaken workers’ initiative.

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Of course, when “The Grapes of Wrath” appeared in 1939, much of America was crippled by the poverty that Steinbeck had reported on for the San Francisco News. A few months later, when Congress began hearings on wages and farm regulations, his novel felt devastatingly current.

Hannah’s negotiation with this 80-year-old material — during a global pandemic that’s weighing on our economy — is necessarily more complicated. She’s examining a traumatic era in American history while also using it to reflect on the current scourges of xenophobia and economic exploitation tearing through the United States.

Then as now, demagogues scream about the dangers of socialism while ignoring the damages of crushed lives and spirits. In lines that sound tragically contemporary, Hannah describes 1930s citizens crouching in fear and resentment, conflating poverty with immorality. “The schools and hospitals were overrun, they said, unable to survive the demands of so many outsiders. They worried about bankruptcy and losing their way of life and being made unsafe by the wave of crime and disease they blamed on migrants.”

Like Steinbeck, Hannah attends to the economic and political forces killing these workers. “This is America,” a young woman tells Elsa. “How can this be happening to us?” Migrant children are effectively excluded from public schools. Hospitals refuse to treat laborers. Any talk of resistance or organizing is beaten into silence by bat-wielding police. And Hannah offers a particularly powerful illustration of the way the company store traps farmworkers in a cycle of consumption and debt — an almost quaint version of the insidious credit industry that enslaves millions of Americans today.

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But if Hannah demonstrates a socialist’s faith in the need for stronger controls over the powers of capital, she still makes a bad Marxist. After all, her primary interest in “The Four Winds” remains Elsa’s potential for independence. Yes, the fight to unionize the farmworkers eventually provides the story’s climactic action — and its frosted-lens romance — but the real focus is always Elsa’s struggle to be brave, to understand that “courage is fear you ignore.” This is, almost from the first page, a story about Elsa’s efforts to cast off the crippling limits imposed by her parents and be the person she wants to be.

In fact, despite the strong echoes to “The Grapes of Wrath,” Hannah may be working closer to 19th-century melodrama. The heroines of “The Four Winds” are purely heroic; its villains wholly evil. Hannah never risks ambiguity; her pages are 100 percent irony-free. And she moves with a relentless pace. Her prose, so ordinary line by line, nevertheless accumulates into scenes that rush from one emergency to the next — starving! beating! flooding! — pausing only for respites of sentimentality. (There’s a little boy in these pages so sweet he could be ground up to flavor 8 million cupcakes.)

Despite Hannah’s extraordinary commercial success, the snob in me wonders what this indefatigable author could produce if she endured a little tougher editorial criticism and gave herself a little more time. (She’s published 24 novels in 30 years.) But that would mean fiddling with the well-oiled machine that reliably produces such marketable passion. I confess, I spent too long rolling my eyes at the flat style, the shiny characters and the clunky polemics of “The Four Winds” before finally giving in and snuffling, “ I’m not crying — you’re crying!”

Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com .

From our archives:

Review: “The Great Alone,” by Kristin Hannah

The Four Winds

By Kristin Hannah

St. Martin’s. 464 pp. $28.99

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Awards & Accolades

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

THE FOUR WINDS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2021

For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.

The miseries of the Depression and Dust Bowl years shape the destiny of a Texas family.

“Hope is a coin I carry: an American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times in my journey when I felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going.” We meet Elsa Wolcott in Dalhart, Texas, in 1921, on the eve of her 25th birthday, and wind up with her in California in 1936 in a saga of almost unrelieved woe. Despised by her shallow parents and sisters for being sickly and unattractive—“too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself”—Elsa escapes their cruelty when a single night of abandon leads to pregnancy and forced marriage to the son of Italian immigrant farmers. Though she finds some joy working the land, tending the animals, and learning her way around Mama Rose's kitchen, her marriage is never happy, the pleasures of early motherhood are brief, and soon the disastrous droughts of the 1930s drive all the farmers of the area to despair and starvation. Elsa's search for a better life for her children takes them out west to California, where things turn out to be even worse. While she never overcomes her low self-esteem about her looks, Elsa displays an iron core of character and courage as she faces dust storms, floods, hunger riots, homelessness, poverty, the misery of migrant labor, bigotry, union busting, violent goons, and more. The pedantic aims of the novel are hard to ignore as Hannah embodies her history lesson in what feels like a series of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd emotions.

Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-2501-7860-2

Page Count: 464

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020

HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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SEEN & HEARD

Our Verdict

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2022

Pulitzer Prize Winner

DEMON COPPERHEAD

by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.

Inspired by David Copperfield , Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.

It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Barbara Kingsolver

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Review: The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah is an impactful and epic story set during the Dust Bowl era.

I’ve been looking forward to The Four Winds for quite some time! I knew this would be a big hit for 2021 and that’s why I included it in my huge must-read book club picks for 2021 list. This is the exact kind of novel that is perfect for book clubs. A historical fiction story that is completely relevant to our current situation with the pandemic and also climate change. It’s eerie how history does tend to repeat itself in various ways.

And of course, Kristin Hannah is one of the best writers out there. So you also get a sweeping story that is quite emotional. I’m fairly certain every Kristin Hannah story has made me cry at the end and it was no different with The Four Winds . I’m talking full on tears at the end! I still believe The Nightingale is her best work to date but The Four Winds is very close. I can’t recommend this one enough.

The Synopsis

Texas, 1921. A time of abundance. The Great War is over, the bounty of the land is plentiful, and America is on the brink of a new and optimistic era. But for Elsa Wolcott, deemed too old to marry in a time when marriage is a woman’s only option, the future seems bleak. Until the night she meets Rafe Martinelli and decides to change the direction of her life. With her reputation in ruin, there is only one respectable choice: marriage to a man she barely knows.

By 1934, the world has changed; millions are out of work and drought has devastated the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as crops fail and water dries up and the earth cracks open. Dust storms roll relentlessly across the plains. Everything on the Martinelli farm is dying, including Elsa’s tenuous marriage; each day is a desperate battle against nature and a fight to keep her children alive.

In this uncertain and perilous time, Elsa—like so many of her neighbors—must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or leave it behind and go west, to California, in search of a better life for her family.

The Four Winds  is a rich, sweeping novel that stunningly brings to life the Great Depression and the people who lived through it—the harsh realities that divided us as a nation and the enduring battle between the haves and the have-nots. A testament to hope, resilience, and the strength of the human spirit to survive adversity,  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.

We read the story from the perspectives of Elsa and her teenage daughter, Loreda. The story starts off with Elsa feeling very isolated at her family home. A heart condition has crippled her parents’ perspective of her so that they don’t believe she’ll accomplish anything nor will anyone want to marry her. Her parents are so cruel—it’s quite shocking.

When the charming and naive Rafe shows an interest in Elsa, everything changes from that point forward. She gets pregnant (with Loreda) and Rafe is forced to give up his parents dream of him going to college, while Elsa is banished from her home forever. She moves to the Martinelli farm and is eventually embraced as one of their own by Rafe’s parents.

While the marriage is far from a dream, Elsa finds her place at the farm. And when times are good, it’s great. But then, it all changes when the drought invades the precious land. Everyone is then forced to make decisions that will have life alternating impacts.

I liked Elsa quite a bit and I really felt for her so many times in her journey. All she wants is love and to be loved in return. But she doesn’t get that from her husband and when Loreda becomes a teenager, she resents everything her mom represents. But through all the hardships, Elsa’s strength and resilience throughout the story is inspiring and impactful.

So I just finished Firefly Lane (also by Kristin Hannah) a couple weeks before reading this story and that also featured a complicated mother/daughter relationship. Despite being different stories, it shows that the mother/daughter relationships are unique and difficult at times.

Loreda, unlike her mother, is a dreamer. She believes there’s so much more out there than the farm life and feels suffocated. I do think the reader can feel both frustrated with how Loreda treats her mother but also understanding of how she feels so trapped. The devastation of the land really forces Loreda to grow up quite a bit. Her character development is very strong and she finds her voice in more ways than one.

History Component

If you’ve visited Book Club Chat in the past, you know that I’m a big fan of historical fiction. And it really boils down to this reason: you’ll learn something new about either a historical figure or a moment in history. We all know about the Dust Bowl and many of us had to read The Grapes of Wrath in high school. But I really learned quite a bit from reading The Four Winds —more so than in my Oklahoma history class in high school (I grew in Oklahoma)! I had no idea about the manmade problem that helped contribute to the devastation, which is something that can be witnessed today with the impacts of climate change.

It’s also interesting, and bizarre, to read about how “okies” was such a slang word used to represent anyone fleeing the broken farms for a better life in California. These people had nothing to their name and it seemed many CA locals didn’t let them forget it. It’s quite heart wrenching to read the cruelty towards poverty, but there are some kind people who make an appearance too.

I loved this story. It had everything I want in a historical fiction novel. It’s impactful, devastating, but also full of heart. If you’re reading this with your book club, check out my book club questions here .

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In “The Four Winds,” the author of “The Nightingale” and “The Great Alone” takes readers back to another era of environmental disaster, economic collapse and fresh starts.

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By Elisabeth Egan

Growing up in California and the Pacific Northwest, Kristin Hannah never wanted to become a novelist. It was a career for dreamers, she thought, kids who took creative writing classes and scribbled stories from the time they were 6.

“I just wasn’t that person,” she said in a video interview from her home outside Seattle. “Until I was in my third year of law school and my mother was dying of breast cancer. Every day I would visit her and complain about my classes. One afternoon, my mother said, ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to be a writer.’”

This was news to Hannah. The two decided to write a romance novel set in 18th-century Scotland. “That was her choice,” Hannah said. “I would have written horror. But it gave us something to talk about.”

In 1985, the day she wrote the first nine pages — her inaugural foray into fiction — she received a call from her father, telling her she needed to get to the hospital. There, before her mother died, Hannah, then 24, had a chance to whisper, “I started.”

But she put the book on hold and resumed her original plan, practicing law at a Seattle firm — until, she said, “a few years later, I went into labor at 14 weeks and was bedridden until my son was born. I realized that I probably wouldn’t have more children and I wanted to be home for the first few years. So I thought, I’ll try writing a book.”

But not the one she started with her mother. “That was a terrible, terrible book,” Hannah said. “It’s now in a box that says ‘Do Not Publish Even After Death.’”

She published her debut novel, “A Handful of Heaven,” in 1991. It was a historical romance set in Alaska — a place she returned to almost three decades later in “ The Great Alone ,” which sold two million copies in the United States.

Hannah experienced an even bigger breakout hit with “The Nightingale,” her 2015 historical novel, which sold 4.5 million copies worldwide. Her books have now been translated into 43 languages, her name is an anchor tenant on best-seller lists, and you would be hard-pressed to find a book club that has not discussed one of her novels. Of her mother’s long-ago prediction, Hannah said, “I tell you, this woman is somewhere with a martini and a cigarette telling all her friends, ‘I told you so.’”

Hannah, 60, lives with her husband; her son is now grown. Gone are the days when she had to squeeze in bursts of writing around naps and school hours. She works from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. most days, writing drafts in longhand on yellow legal pads. “I can write in my backyard, by the fire, on the beach, on an airplane,” Hannah said. “It helps to be disciplined, but I also believe creativity follows discipline.”

Her 24th book, “The Four Winds,” which comes out on Tuesday, seems eerily prescient in 2021, with its Depression-era tale of blighted land, xenophobia, fear of contagion — and determination to join forces and rebuild. Its message is galvanizing and hopeful: We are a nation of scrappy survivors. We’ve been in dire straits before; we will be again. Hold your people close. Her publisher, St. Martin’s Press, is planning an initial printing of 1 million copies.

“I wanted to tell a quintessentially American story,” Hannah said. “The Dust Bowl was the greatest ecological disaster in American history and that, combined with the partisan divide of the Great Depression, really spoke to me.”

The protagonist of “The Four Winds” is Elsa Martinelli, a single mother of two who, in 1935, leaves a parched family farm in Lonesome Tree, Texas, for California. She is unmoved by brochures promising milk and honey in the “Land of Opportunity.” She needs steady work and fresh air for her son, who is recovering from “dust pneumonia,” a then-common ailment on the Great Plains. (Readers who feel inconvenienced by cloth masks may feel differently after spending time with characters who wear gas masks in their homes.)

In the San Joaquin Valley, the Martinellis trade one set of terrible circumstances for another. Work is scarce. Locals are cruelly suspicious of newcomers, who they believe carry disease. Nobody will rent to “Okies,” as migrants were known — regardless of whether they were from Oklahoma — so the family settles into a squalid camp on the banks of an irrigation ditch.

How Elsa claws her way out is the crux of “The Four Winds.” Friendship is a lifeline, as it is for many women in Hannah’s books, including the pair in “ Firefly Lane .” On Wednesday, Netflix begins streaming its television adaptation of that book, starring Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke.

“I deeply value my female friendships. That’s something that has been reinforced in this pandemic,” Hannah said. “So it made sense to me that Elsa finds a mother and a girlfriend. Those relationships give her the power to stand up for herself.”

One of Hannah’s closest friends is her writing partner of more than 30 years — the novelist Megan Chance, whom she met early in her career at a lunch hosted by a local writers’ group.

“We were both in the bathroom at the same time. We traded phone numbers at the sink and decided to read each others’ manuscripts,” Chance said in a phone interview. “It was this instantaneous connection, the most weirdly fated meeting I’ve ever had.”

They started talking on the phone every day, honing their work according to writing advice from authors such as Dwight Swain, Jack Bickham and Robert McKee . “Our process changes every couple of years depending on what we’re writing and what’s going on in our lives,” Hannah said, “but generally I’ll give Megan 150 or 200 pages, and that’s the beginning.”

“I think our critiques would devastate other people,” joked Chance, whose latest novel is “A Splendid Ruin.” “But there’s also this trust. We know each others’ histories. When Kristin calls me and says ‘I’m feeling this way,’ I go, ‘You always feel that way.’ And she’ll go, ‘I do?’ Kristin knows story better than any person I’ve ever known. She has it in her bones.”

In 1993, Hannah had another fortuitous encounter — this time at a hotel bar during a romance writers’ convention, where she met her now-longtime editor, Jennifer Enderlin, who is the president and publisher of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

In a phone interview, Enderlin traced Hannah’s many reinventions throughout her career — from mass-market romance writer to hardcover author to book-club best seller to spinner of historical sagas. “With ‘The Nightingale,’ she went from being considered ‘women’s fiction’ to being considered a literary novelist,” Enderlin said. “She has an instinct for why something worked; she’s analytical and intuitive at the same time.”

As she worked on “The Four Winds,” Hannah was inspired by Dorothea Lange’s photographs , especially “Woman of the High Plains” — “You can see how tired, afraid and heroic she is all at once” — and by the writings of Sanora Babb , an aspiring journalist who documented life in migrant camps for the Farm Security Administration only to have her own novel in progress scooped by “ The Grapes of Wrath .”

“She took copious notes on conversations with residents, what they cared about and what they were having trouble with,” Hannah said before describing how Babb’s boss funneled these observations to John Steinbeck. “Amazing, right?”

She smiled ruefully. “I’m devoted to putting women in the forefront of historical stories. To telling women’s stories.”

“The Four Winds” includes a few lines from Babb’s novel, “Whose Names Are Unknown,” which was finally published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2004: “One thing was left, as clear and perfect as a drop of rain — the desperate need to stand together … They would rise and fall and, in their falling, rise again.”

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Review: Kristin Hannah's 'The Four Winds' is a 'stirring' tale of love and hardship in Dust Bowl-era America

Corrections & clarifications: A previous version of this story misidentified a 2018 film titled “The Nightingale.” The adaptation of Kristin Hannah's book of the same name has not yet been released.

As the Dust Bowl ravages Texas, one woman must make a choice: Leave the farm that has been her family’s livelihood or stay and risk succumbing to cyclones of dirt.

Kristin Hannah ’s absorbing new novel begins just a few years before, when it seemed as if Elsa Wolcott might finally have a peaceful, fulfilling life ahead. After a rough childhood with parents who didn’t love her, she met Rafe Martinelli, the soulful and handsome son of Italian immigrants. Unlike any other person in her life, he made her feel valued. She moved in with his family, and together they made a healthy living, raising two children while they worked the earth.

There are greater forces in the world than love and dedication, however. "The Four Winds" (St. Martin’s Press, 464 pp., *** ½ out of four stars) plays out against the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl that together gutted the American economy and turned beloved farms into ruins. As the Texas panhandle parches out, Elsa watches their crops wither and has to send her children scrambling through the dirt to find any scrap potatoes that might remain in the fields. Meanwhile, her parents-in-law sweep and sweep, trying to rid the house of ever-accumulating dust. Hannah’s writing is at its strongest when she takes us into the vivid hardships of the drought, as overuse of the land results in storms of topsoil that flay skin from muscle and fill the bellies of staggered cattle with dirt.

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Elsa is resilient, and readers will be drawn to her devotion to her children and her tireless efforts to keep her family well, efforts that bring her to pack them up and head west. On the journey she has to contend not just with the hardships of picking cotton for pitiful wages, but with the weaker wills of the men around her, who abandon family or run ruthless corporate farms that exploit their employees. Along the way, Elsa develops a greater consciousness of the plight of laborers in Depression-era America, joining them in protests against the larger political and economic engines that exploit people and land alike, leading to the Dust Bowl in the first place.

"The Four Winds" is epic and transporting, a stirring story of hardship and love that is likely to lead to a film adaptation (Hannah’s previous best-selling novel, "The Nightingale," is getting a film adaptation later this year starring Dakota and Elle Fanning). At times this book feels a little too ready for Hollywood. While most of Hannah’s writing is specific and surprising, the novel’s beating heart weakens a little in the last section as it falls into familiar crowd-pleaser story beats, with a simplified villain and a quick epiphany just in time to give a rousing speech. But these ninth inning fumbles do little to diminish the overall power of this majestic and absorbing story that turns attention to the unsung women of the Dust Bowl, who “worked from sunup to sundown, too, toiled on wheat farms until we were as dry and baked as the land we loved.”

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The Four Winds

By kristin hannah.

Book review and synopsis for The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah, a tale of one woman's courage during the Great Depression.

In The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah, Elsa Wolcott is a woman trying to raise two children on farm in the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl following the Great Depression. She watches as the lands around her crack in their perpetually parched state and the hopelessness threatens to breaks the spirit of those around her.

As the situation worsens, Elsa is forced to make a decision to stay and fight or leave for the uncertain and unfamiliar lands in the West. In this tale, Kristin has written a survival story about resilience, love, family, courage and the American Dream.

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Full Plot Summary

(The one-paragraph version: During the Dust Bowl in the Texas Panhandle, Elsa Wolcott is a woman who dreams of going to college, but gets pregnant instead and has two kids. She becomes a farmer with her husband's family, though he leaves them, and they struggle with the unending drought. When she's finally able to leave with her kids, they become migrant workers in California -- which she quickly realizes is an exploitative system. Elsa falls in love with a union organizer and helps to organize a strike against their bosses, but gets shot by the farm boss. She dies giving a voice to the workers. Her daughter, Loreda, returns home to Texas. At 18, Loreda prepares to return to California to go to college.)

The Four Winds is divided up into four sections, each detailing events from (roughly) that year.

In 1921 , Elsa Wolcott is a 25-year-old unmarried woman who is not particularly pretty and too tall for most men. She feels restless and destined for spinsterhood. Instead, she meets and sleeps with Rafe Martinelli . When Elsa gets pregnant, her father disowns her, and Rafe's parents ( Tony and Rose ) tell him to marry Elsa. Rafe dreams of leaving for the big city, but does his duty. Over time, Elsa finds her place on the Martinelli farm, and the baby (name Loreda ) is born.

By 1934 , Loreda is 12 and has a difficult relationship with her mother. Elsa and Rafe now also have a son, Anthony ("Ant") , 7. The past few years have been difficult, with the Great Depression, an on-going drought and frequent dust storms ravaging the lands. Rafe is unhappy, drinks heavily and dreams of going West to pursue new opportunities. Loreda longs to leave as well, and she prefers her father's dreams to her mother's dreary, joyless work ethic. One day, Rafe abandons them with only a note. As the drought continues, their animals die and supplies run out. After a week-long dust storm, Ant is severely ill due to inhalation of dust. The doctor says he must leave to survive, so Elsa packs up the household into the car. Before she departs, Rose and Tony announce they won't be going. Instead, they are staying to take a governmental payment to grow grass as part of a soil conservation plan to help save the farmland of the Great Plains. Uncertain and scared, Elsa reluctantly leaves with just Art and Loreda.

In 1935 , the three of them embark on the ride towards California. They are disheveled and unkept by the time they arrive, and people are rude to them. To save money, spend a night in a tent camp with other migrants, only to learn that wages for migrant work are so low that they'll have to stay there indefinitely. They befriend Jean (who is pregnant) and Jeb Dewey , who show them the ropes. Elsa ends up doing seasonal field work for larger farms. Loreda, too, skips school during cotton-picking season to help, though Elsa's ardent wish is for Loreda to go to college. When money runs low in the winter, Elsa starts standing in the food lines for assistance.

In 1936 , Jean goes into labor, but the hospital refuses to admit migrants like her, and the baby is stillborn. The death of the baby is the last straw for Loreda, who hates their life there. She runs away and hitches a ride with Jack Dewey , who works for a Communist organization, Workers United . They stop off at a meeting, and Loreda is inspired by the cause. With a new sense of direction, Loreda no longer wants to run away and goes home. When a flash flood hits the migrant camp, everyone there, including the Martinellis, lose everything.

Jack helps the Martinellis move into a cabin on camp for a large farming operation, Welty Farms , while also encouraging Elsa to unionize its workers. Despite Loreda's interest in the cause, Elsa firmly resists. Elsa soon realizes that Welty's camp is designed to keep their workers poor and indebted to them, but she doesn't want to risk her job. It's not until she sees Jean die from typhoid and Welty casually decrease the wages for its workers that Elsa realizes she must join in the fight. She and Jack fall in love as they help to plan a strike. When the strike finally happens, Elsa propels it forwards when Jack is incapacitated, but Elsa is shot. Before Elsa dies, she asks Jack to take her kids home to Texas.

In the Epilogue , in 1940, Loreda has been living in Texas. She misses her mother. The book ends with her about to return to California to become the first Martinelli to go to college.

For more detail, see the full Chapter-by-Chapter Summary .

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Book Review

In Kristin Hannah’s recently released The Four Winds (published February 2, 2020), Elsa is a woman trying to raise two children on a Texas farm as they watch the lands dry out and as relentless dust storms ravage everything in sight. All around them, people pack up and leave for greener lands and jobs out West, but what actually awaits out there is uncertain at best.

Kristin Hannah’s last novel, The Great Alone , was about a family taming the unforgiving Alaskan wilderness. With The Four Winds , Hannah has penned another survival story, this time about a family in the Great Plains struggling through the difficulties of poverty and famine during the Dust Bowl in the years after the Great Depression.

While both these novels are survival stories, The Four Winds is the one I’d recommend if you’re on the fence between the two of them. It’s been a while since I read it, but I recall finding The Great Alone a little dreary , preferring mostly the beginning parts before the book really gets underway.

While the characters in The Four Winds go through hardships as well, there’s more of a sense of pioneering spirit and resilience that I found uplifting and engaging to read about. It’s a book about determination, love for one’s family and for oneself, the fight to survive and the American Dream.

I also thought it was charming that at the heart of the story is a mother-daughter relationship. The two protagonists of the book, Elsa and Loreda, are both fully drawn and compelling characters. They have a complex relationship that develops and changes as the story progresses in ways that will challenge you to think about your own relationships.

The Four Winds is also a true historical fiction novel, bringing in bits and pieces of historical facts from the time periods it covers. Most of the things that come up are facts that you’d probably heard about in history class, but having it placed into the context of a vivid and expansive story really brought to life a time period that I’ve never really spent much time thinking about.

That all said, like Hannah’s other novels, The Four Winds is fairly plot driven, and I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone looking to read literary fiction. That’s not to say this book has no substance, it’s just that it’s not that kind of book.

The cynical part of me thinks that this book overly optimistic when it comes to the kindness of strangers and some of the plot occurrences rely on people just happening to be in the right place at the right time. I also wish Elsa would have found a way to love herself (and to feel that she is loved) separate from a man’s recognition of her worth. Nevertheless, I think it’s worth suspending your disbelief and judgement to just sit back and enjoy this sprawling, tender and engaging historical tale.

Read it or Skip It?

The Four Winds is a historical fiction novel that tells a survival story centered around a mother and her daughter. If you’re a fan of Kristin Hannah or a historical fiction fan in general, I think you’ll really like this book. I’m also guessing that this will be a hit with book clubs, given that it’s accessible and tells a relatively fast-paced story.

It also occurred to me while reading it that, given the strong and complicated mother-daughter relationship in this book, that this could be a great mother’s day gift or a good book give to your mom to read together, if you’re looking for an activity to do with them remotely. It’s a great book to chat about, and I’ve included some discussion questions below if you’re needing ideas on topics.

It’s not a difficult read, so if you’re on the fence about it, I’d encourage you to give it a shot.

See The Four Winds on Amazon.

The Four Winds Audiobook Review

The audiobook runs 15 hours. Overall, I liked it. I think the narrator does a good job with it, and it’s easy to listen to.

The accent she does for the dialogue parts is more southern than Texan (where the characters are from), and it slips in and out at times, but I can’t imagine that most people will notice or care.

If you listened to the audiobook, did anyone else notice how the narrator pronounces drought as DROW-TH a bunch of times? Is this some type of pronunciation that I’m not aware of? The first time I heard it, I assumed it was a mistake, but the second time I started wondering if there are people out there who just pronounce it that way. Anyway, not a big deal, just wondering.

Edit: Someone in the comments mentioned that it’s mentioned at some point that people in that area pronounced drought as DROW-TH at that time — in that case, I love that the narrator included it in the audiobook!

Hear a sample of The Four Winds audiobook on Libro.fm.

Discussion Questions

• What did you think of Elsa as a character, and did your perception of Elsa shift throughout the novel? If so, how?
• What did you think of Loreda as a character and how her relationship with Elsa shifts throughout the novel? What do you think prompts the changes in her behavior or in their relationship?
• Do you think the way Elsa sees Loreda is accurate? Conversely, do you think the way Loreda sees Elsa is accurate?
• What do you think drives Loreda’s anger throughout the book?
• Why do you think Loreda takes on her father’s mindset instead of her mothers? How does Loreda’s view of her father change throughout the book and why?
• Why do you think Rafe abandons his family instead of just saying he’ll go find a job and send money home?
• Based on the information she had at the time, do you think Elsa was wrong not to seriously consider the possibility of moving to California with Rafe, especially when everyone was moving and he was so unhapy?
• Why do you think Loreda decides to decisively shoot Milo, a horse that she loves? What does it say about Loreda as a person that she chooses to do this?
• What do you think the idea of owning land and working the land means to people? Why do you think Rose and Tony are so determined to stay on the land?
• How does Hannah’s description of the experience of migrant workers traveling from the South to California compare with the modern day treatment of immigrants looking for work?
• Why do you think Loreda doesn’t take her education that seriously? Why do you think she insists on leaving school to pick cotton?
• How do the characters in the book react in the face of poverty? Or losing their land? At the prospect of needing governmental assistance? Why do you think Elsa is reluctant at first to go to the relief office or stand in the food line when they arrive in California?
• Hannah mixes in a variety of historical facts as she tells this family’s story and show the technology progressing in that era. Was there anything in particular that you feel you learned or which surprised you?

Book Excerpt

Read the first pages of The Four Winds

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The Four Winds is 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.

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We’re they really communist the union organizers

Why did they have them leave grandmas farm

Wh didn’t hey drive back to farm

I haven’t finished the book so I’m kind of sad I asked the first question.

Poor simplistic review. As an avid reader I found this book compelling and informative. Although the darkness that is present in much of America literature e.g. Sam Shepherds work or Truman Capotes work denies the power of the kindness of strangers you may want to read Cold Millions by Jess Walters and then be that kind person who reaches across to do great good work.

I listened to the audiobook and loved it. One note – the pronunciation of “drought “ as “drouth” is deliberate and the reason is addressed in the story. In short, that’s how the locals pronounced it.

ahh awesome thank you! I figured I was missing something here that makes sense!

Loved the audio book!

I’m trying to get a description of the characters for this book. Does anyone know where that may be on the web?

If you’re looking for a feel good type of book. This may not be the book for you. I found it very depressing and had to force myself to finish it

Just started The Four Winds and I’m wondering where Elsa would have found a copy of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure given the times and small town she lived in

What happened to Rafe? Did he make it to California? What happened to the Wolcott family? Did they lose they’re business? Did Elsa’s married sisters survive?

I enjoyed The Great Alone and The Nightingale, I’ll have to check this one out! Thanks for the great review.

After 1936/37 did work pulling cotton improve for the workers?

Although a lengthy read with some good descriptive writing, I found the story really sketchy, threadbare and boring. What on earth happened to Rafe and Ella’s family? Although the story dragged along, the ending was abrupt and I felt, cobbled together. So many characters, like Jean, were really two dimensional.

Thank you Kristin for hours of enjoyment while listening to The Four Winds! I belong to a book club, run by a dear friend. who recently moved to Cambridge, MA. This story, about family, love, & struggle during the Dust Bowl, captivated my interest from start to finish! I really loved Elsa’s finding her strengths & the relationship between mother & daughter, throughout the story is fascinating, touching & heart braking, but hopeful! Both Elsa & Loreda, are very strong personalities, which eventually find common ground & are able to come together in family love & unity! The ending was terribly sad, but true to life. I highly recommend it!

"The Four Winds" by Kristin Hannah is officially the best book of 2021, according to Book of the Month members — here's why the historical fiction novel is so popular

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• "The Four Winds" by Kristin Hannah  is a 2021 historical fiction novel about the Dust Bowl era.
• It just won Book of the Month's 2021 Book of the Year Award , based on votes from members .
• The book powerfully captures a lesser-known period of US history that still feels relevant today.

"The Four Winds" just won Book of the Month's 2021 Best Book of the Year Award : A prestigious prize that's been given out since 1926 and is based on the votes of Book of the Month's readers .

A raw and emotional historical fiction novel about survival, heroism, and pursuit of the American Dream during the Great Depression, "The Four Winds" quickly became a bestseller on nearly every possible list from the New York Times to Publisher's Weekly . It's also considered one of the best books of the year among both Amazon editors and Goodreads reviewers . 

Though Kristin Hannah has now written 24 books , I was introduced to her writing when I picked up "The Nightingale" in 2017, which still ranks as one of the top five novels I've ever read. It's for that very reason that I hesitated to pick this book up — I was scared it wouldn't live up to the hype or the level of emotion I felt with "The Nightingale." 

But I love when books prove me wrong. "The Four Winds" absolutely ranks as one of the best books I've read this year — and I won't be surprised when it's nominated for countless other awards.

Here are the 3 biggest reasons "The Four Winds" lives up to the hype:

1. It illuminates a piece of US history that is often overlooked. 

"The Four Winds" takes place during the Dust Bowl period of the Great Depression , when farmlands in Oklahoma and Northern Texas were plagued by insufferable drought and deadly dust storms, brought about by unsustainable farming practices. (You might remember this historical setting if you ever read John Steinbeck's " The Grapes of Wrath." )

The novel primarily follows a young woman named Elsa, who gets pregnant and is married at 25 to a young Italian man named Rafe. She moves onto his family's wheat farm in the 1920s to raise children and help her husband's family work the land — until the Dust Bowl era begins. Combined with the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl meant complete poverty, starvation, and often death for the farmers, who began to dream of traveling west in the hopes of better jobs and opportunities.

The story is so historically accurate, I'm shocked these characters weren't real people. Several times throughout the book, I found myself looking up the events that occurred, like the Black Sunday Dust Storm, and checking timelines to see if any reprieve might be coming to the characters soon.   

It's also interesting to note that readers are starting to search specifically for historical settings in literature outside of World War II — I've even seen reviewers sort historical fiction novels into categories of "World War II" and "Not World War II," feeling like they've read so many war stories already. While it's important to tell stories from all corners of history, this one illuminates a devastating piece of history that's often overlooked because it was overshadowed by the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II.  

 2. Kristin Hannah's writing is emotional in the best way. 

I feel more raw emotion reading Kristin Hannah's work than with any other fiction author — she's the only one to ever make me cry. The characters and events are so clearly portrayed that it makes all of the feelings — from anger to sadness — much more visceral. 

Elsa Martinelli has to make countless, immensely difficult choices in this story, and I felt every single one of them. From choosing to rise above the trauma of her childhood, to dealing with hard conversations about whether or not to leave the farm, to scrutinizing every move with her childrens' wellbeing as the priority, Elsa is undoubtedly a hero as she navigates impossible circumstances.

As with other Kristin Hannah novels, I opened the book and wondered how many times I would sit there, mouth agape in shock, tears welling in my eyes. (The answer turned out to be four.)

 3. Despite being historical fiction, it feels as timely as ever. 

As this story got into the tough historical conversations of poverty cycles, living wages, and classism, I couldn't help but think about the ways in which history is repeating itself. 

"The Four Winds" received mild criticism from some readers for the inclusivity of "political topics," but I think it would have been impossible to capture what life was truly like and why people faced these challenges without including the systems that trapped them in cycles of poverty. 

Turning away from hard topics doesn't make them go away, and this novel stared straight into the problem, subtly connecting this piece of history and the ways we failed to solve it to countless other moments in history. As I made these subtle connections through time, I realized how truly brilliant this book is. 

The bottom line  

"The Four Winds" is completely deserving of this year's Book of the Year award because it's a brilliant and emotional story of heroism and pursuit of the American Dream, with timely messages about the power of bravery in the face of fear. 

I would recommend this book to historical fiction lovers, readers looking for a good cry, or anyone searching for the best books of 2021.  

The 4 other finalists for best books of the year, selected by Book of the Month members :

"The People We Meet on Vacation" by Emily Henry, available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $9.98

Poppy and Alex are giving their friendship one more shot by taking a summer vacation together, two years since everything changed between them and they nearly went their separate ways forever.    

"Razorblade Tears" by S.A. Cosby, available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $16.71

When Isiah and his husband Derek are murdered, their two-ex con fathers set out on a mission for revenge — but must confront their own prejudices if they ever hope to move forward. 

"The Lost Apothecary" by Sarah Penner, available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $13.99

Split between 18th century and present-day London, a 12-year-old makes a fatal mistake in an apothecary, the effects of which last centuries.  

"Malibu Rising" by Taylor Jenkins Reid, available at Amazon and Bookshop , from $16.80

In 1983 Malibu, the famous Riva siblings are about to have their infamous annual house party in this historical family drama told over 24 hours.

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Book Review: The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

In “The Four Winds,” Kristin Hannah delves into a period of American history marked by intense struggle and the burgeoning fight for workers’ rights, presenting a poignant narrative that intersects with themes of labor movements reminiscent of those explored by Jess Walter in “The Cold Millions.” Although the novel spans an extensive length, with moments where the narrative thread loosens slightly, it remains a compelling and thoughtfully composed piece.

What is “The Four Winds” by Kristin Hannah about? “The Four Winds” by Kristin Hannah is about Elsa Wolcott’s journey from the Dust Bowl in Texas to California during the Great Depression, showcasing her resilience and quest for a better life amidst hardship.

“As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced before. We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit, In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another–what we have in common–that will save us.” ―  Kristin Hannah, The Four Winds

Set against the backdrop of 1921 Texas, the story introduces us to Elsa Wolcott, cast by her own family as an unattractive spinster destined for a life of seclusion. Amid the wealth and comfort of her family’s home, she is a woman trapped by societal norms and parental expectations. Yet, beneath her subdued exterior beats the heart of a woman filled with desires and dreams, akin to the heroines of the novels she so avidly devours. Elsa’s initial predicament, edged with the Victorian sensibility of a Brontë novel, quickly transforms as she sews a bold red dress and takes a leap towards a future she never envisioned.

The ensuing relationship with Rafe, and the resultant forced marriage after an unplanned pregnancy, catapults Elsa out of her sheltered life and into the harsh realities of farm life during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Hannah’s prose masterfully conveys the devastation wrought by these twin disasters, painting a visceral picture of the relentless dust storms and the unyielding sun that scorches the hopes of many.

“Heartache had been a part of her life so long it had become as familiar as the color of her hair or the slight curve in her spine. Sometimes it was the lens through which she viewed her world and sometimes it was the blindfold she wore so she didn’t see. But it was always there.” ―  Kristin Hannah,  The Four Winds

As the Wolcott family’s narrative shifts to California, the novel expands its scope to explore the grim conditions of migrant labor camps and the unrelenting exploitation of workers. Here, the story aligns with a rich tradition of American literature that brings to life the struggles of the working class during this era, echoing the same rich historical detail and empathetic character development found in Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”

“The Four Winds” does not just recount historical events; it immerses the reader in the emotional and physical journey of its characters. Elsa’s evolution from a repressed, dutiful daughter to a resilient matriarch is a testament to the novel’s central focus on personal transformation and the indomitable human spirit. Hannah’s portrayal of Elsa’s struggles is replete with a raw authenticity that captures the desperation of the era while simultaneously speaking to contemporary concerns about economic inequality and workers’ rights.

Despite the novel’s breadth and depth, it maintains a steady pace, propelling the reader through harrowing scenes of adversity—drought, famine, and labor strife—that are offset by moments of tender humanity and intimate familial connections. It is these elements that infuse the book with a timeless quality, bridging the past with present conversations about social justice and community solidarity.

“Love is what remains when everything else is gone. This is what I should have told my children when we left Texas. What I will tell them tonight. Not that they will understand yet. How could they? I am forty years old, and I just learned this fundamental truth myself. Love. In the best of times, it is a dream. In the worst of times, a salvation. I am in love. There it is. I’ve written it down. Soon I will say it out loud. To him. I am in love. As crazy and ridiculous and implausible as it sounds, I am in love. And I am loved in return. And this-love-gives me the courage I need for today. The four winds have blown us here, people from all across the country, to the very edge of this great land, and now, at last, we make our stand, fight for what we know to be right. We fight for our American dream, that it will be possible again. Jack says that I am a warrior and, while I don’t believe it, I know this: A warrior believes in an end she can’t see and fights for it. A warrior never gives up. A warrior fights for those weaker than herself. It sounds like motherhood to me.” ―  Kristin Hannah,  The Four Winds

Kristin Hannah’s narrative strategy, while steering clear of cynicism and maintaining a clear moral compass, manages to breathe life into the historical struggles it portrays. Her characters are crafted with care, from the stalwart protagonist Elsa to the supporting cast that brings the daily battles of the era into stark relief. The tale is interspersed with romance and drama, ensuring that the novel, though occasionally veering towards the sentimental, secures the reader’s investment in the characters’ fates.

“The Four Winds” ultimately emerges as a substantial literary work, chronicling the endurance of the human spirit amidst the vast and often cruel landscape of history. It serves as a reminder of the power of family, the necessity of courage, and the unyielding hope that drives people to strive for better lives against all odds. Hannah’s ability to craft a narrative that resonates with modern audiences while paying homage to the past solidifies “The Four Winds” as not only an enthralling story but an important commentary on the resilience and resolve that defines the American character.

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Book Review: 'The Four Winds' Is Classic Kristin Hannah—So Grab The Tissues

About three years ago, author Kristin Hannah began writing a novel about hard times in America—the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, economic collapse, massive unemployment and income inequality.

“Never in my wildest dreams,” Hannah writes in the author’s note of her new novel, “did I imagine that the Great Depression would become so relevant in our modern lives.”

Hannah’s newest book, The Four Winds , is a story about love, courage, tenacity and hope, told through the eyes of a woman who escapes the misery of the Dust Bowl only to experience the anguish of the Great Depression. Like many of Hannah’s previous characters, Elsa Wolcott is a strong woman who doesn’t recognize her own power—at least not at first.

For Elsa, heartache was “the lens through which she viewed her world and sometimes it was the blindfold she wore so she didn’t see.”

Abandoned by a husband she loved but never really knew, Elsa’s search for a better life for her children drives them west to California, where they live in Hooverville shanty towns and follow the harvest for meager pay. The bigotry they face as outcast “Okies”—struggling to secure food, housing and a living wage—sounds all too familiar, as immigrants experience the same attitudes and challenges today. By the time Elsa and her teen-aged daughter are caught up in the Workers Alliance strikes of the late 1930s, you understand their desolation and cheer their efforts.

Amid the relentless strife, Hannah somehow manages to pepper her novel with mother-daughter angst, female friendship and even romance—all of it culminating with an unforgettable ending. Fans of The Nightingale  won’t be disappointed with the author’s newest work, and they’ll warn you—if you don’t know already—to keep the tissues handy.

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#BookReview The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah @RaincoastBooks @StMartinsPress #TheFourWinds #KristinHannah

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.

Gritty, insightful, and incredibly atmospheric!

The Four Winds is an intriguing tale that sweeps you away to Dalhart, Texas during the 1920s – 1930s, when the country is reeling from the great depression and the townsfolk of West Texas must decide to continue to struggle to maintain their livelihoods, identities, and health through the relentless heat, devastating wind storms, and catastrophic droughts or relocate to the lushness of California where water is plentiful, the land is fertile, but survival may be just as difficult or worse.

The prose is poetic and lyrical. The main characters are strong, resilient, and hardworking. And the plot is an enthralling, emotional saga filled with life, loss, self-discovery, motherhood, familial drama, social stratification, poverty, tragedy, discrimination, inequality, heartbreak, courage, romance, and friendship.

Overall, The Four Winds  is another exquisitely written, exceptionally detailed, beautiful novel by Hannah that I absolutely adored, and is undoubtedly going to be a big hit with historical fiction fans and book clubs everywhere.

This novel is available now.

Pick up a copy from your favourite retailer or from one of the following links.

Thank you to Raincoast Books for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.

About Kristin Hannah

KRISTIN HANNAH is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty novels, including The Nightingale, The Great Alone, and The Four Winds. A former lawyer turned writer, she lives with her husband in the Pacific Northwest.

Photo by Kevin Lynch.

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2 Comments on #BookReview The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah @RaincoastBooks @StMartinsPress #TheFourWinds #KristinHannah

This reminds me of The Grapes Of Wrath, it sounds good.

It does have the same kind of feel ?

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Theresa Smith Writes

Delighting in all things bookish, book review: the four winds by kristin hannah, the four winds…, about the book:.

The Four Winds is a deeply moving, powerful story about the strength and resilience of women and the bond between mother and daughter, by the multi-million copy number one bestselling author Kristin Hannah.

She will discover the best of herself in the worst of times . . .

Texas, 1934. Elsa Martinelli had finally found the life she’d yearned for. A family, a home and a livelihood on a farm on the Great Plains. But when drought threatens all she and her community hold dear, Elsa’s world is shattered to the winds.

Fearful of the future, when Elsa wakes to find her husband has fled, she is forced to make the most agonizing decision of her life. Fight for the land she loves or take her beloved children, Loreda and Ant, west to California in search of a better life. Will it be the land of milk and honey? Or will their experience challenge every ounce of strength they possess?

From the overriding love of a mother for her child, the value of female friendship, and the ability to love again – against all odds, Elsa’s incredible journey is a story of survival, hope and what we do for the ones we love.

My Thoughts:

The Four Winds is very much a novel of social and political American history. It covers that period in the 20th century known as ‘The Great Depression’, but it focuses in on the environmental disaster that coincided with the economic depression and the huge shift of migration from the agricultural interior to the west coast. I studied a unit back at university (way, way, back) on the social and cultural geography of North America. We touched on all regions as an overview and then needed to select two for our specific analysis. I didn’t actually pick the region that contained the areas in this novel known as ‘The Dust Bowl’, but I was introduced to the history in a brief way during the overview. Even with knowing that this combined economic and environmental disaster had occurred, I honestly had no appreciation of the gravity of it.

This novel is entirely depressing. I’m not going to lie. It’s grim. And it should be, because it’s about a prolonged national disaster of epic proportions. The stock market crash in America at the end of the 1920s which led into the economic depression of the early 1930s, which then coincided with a drought throughout the wheat belt (middle America). Not just any drought, a prolonged, years and years long drought that resulted in an environmental disaster never before seen. Over farming led to the land being stripped and changed as prolonged dry conditions caused seismic shifts in the landscape and wind picking up layers of top soil in unending dust storms that occurred with alarming frequency. This led to a life-threatening wide-spread illness called dust pneumonia, where if it didn’t kill you, it would certainly leave you with severely compromised lungs. People couldn’t work their land, livestock filled with dirt and dropped dead, people started getting sick from all the dust inhalation, banks began to foreclose on mortgages, people started driving or walking to California in search of a better life, work, clean air, a fresh start. Except that there was about a million of them, all in search of the same thing, and they ended up becoming unwanted migrants in their own country, forced to live in squalor in camps, begging for work, starving, diseased, ostracised, and when they did find work, it was at the mercy of big business farmers who capitalised on the fact that they could treat their workers any which way they wanted because there were so many more people just waiting on the road for a vacancy to crop up. Are you depressed yet? I know, what a horrendously grim time, and far more extensively catastrophic than I ever realised. In terms of the history of America’s ‘Great Depression’, turns out I knew far less than I thought I did.

Kristin Hannah weaves all of this history into a novel with perfect ease. She focuses in on one farming family and pretty much sets them on the journey that so many Americans took back then. It’s fraught with danger and disaster but I found her handling of it very grounding. She doesn’t give into melodrama or outlandish plot diversions. In many ways, this novel is more literary than her other works of fiction, a social and political study of this period within America, using two female characters from the one family as the device for communicating true events. I liked the all-encompassing scope of the novel, the whole this happened which led to this which then led to this, and so and so on. The story even explores, in its later sections, the push for unionisation of the picking workers who were being abused by big business farmers. People, who were in such desperate and dire situations, being forced to work for an amount that was far below the cost of even the most basic standard of living and being charged for the tools to do it. I like novels that dig into social and political history and this one certainly dug deep.

My only ‘issue’ with this novel was in the characterisation, specifically, Loreda, the daughter of the story. Kristin Hannah tends to write her teenage daughters as real horror heads, truly nasty little pieces of work, particularly when it comes to their mothers. Loreda was a bit much at times, particularly in the first half of the book where her nastiness was rather repetitive as well as tiresome and unnecessary in terms of telling a good story. This was the only time that the story gave into melodrama and cliché characterisation. Loreda was an entitled brat, brutally judgemental when it came to her selfless and hardworking mother, blinded by her adoration of her useless father. At one point, she even blames her mother for the drought. Her bad behaviour was intentional, often putting others at risk and herself in danger, yet, like so many of these sorts of characters, she manages to never run into trouble, get hurt, or have any consequence whatsoever. Everything bad happens to everyone else, including her own mother and brother, but never her. This type of character is a pet hate of mine, so it’s likely I detested her far more than other readers, but this girl really bothered me to the point where I just started to wish that something bad would happen to her so she’d learn her lesson.

Fans of Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale might just feel like she has reached those heights once again with The Four Winds. Casting my minor issues with the one character aside, this novel really is an excellent read – expansive, grounded in history, and deeply moving. It’s predominantly doom and gloom and the hopeful ending is rather bittersweet, but I think it manages to get away with this because of how insightful and impactful the narrative is all the way through. Readers new to Kristin Hannah and long-term fans will all be more than satisfied with this terrific new release. I anticipate seeing this one on the bestseller lists for most of this year.

About the Author:

Kristin Hannah is a New York Times bestselling author. She is a former lawyer turned writer and is the mother of one son. She and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest near Seattle, and Hawaii. Her first novel published in the UK, Night Road, was one of eight books selected for the UK’s 2011 TV Book Club Summer Read, and her novel The Nightingale was a New York Times number one bestseller, selling almost three million copies worldwide.

The Four Winds Published by Pan Macmillan Australia Released 27th January 2021

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14 thoughts on “ book review: the four winds by kristin hannah ”.

Seriously can’t wait to read this one. Everyone who has read it so far has said its brilliant and I love her novels.

Like Liked by 1 person

It’s a terrific piece of historical fiction. And I certainly haven’t read much on this topic so it was interesting to me from the outset. She is a very good writer, I think I’m leaning towards liking her historical fiction more than her contemporary though.

An excellent review; I loved hearing your perspective on the book which I also read.

I’ve enjoyed the novels I’ve read so far from Kristin Hannah so I’ll have to make sure I get this to read at some stage!

I’m pretty certain you will enjoy this one.

I am very much looking forward to reading this one!

I hope you love it!

I can’t believe anyone could compare Four Winds with the Nightingale, the latter being one of the best books I ever read. I appreciate the educational aspect of Four Winds as I didn’t know what happened with the farmers at that time, but I can’t say I enjoyed the book and all of it’s misery. My friend who loaned it to me, as I couldn’t wait to read it, didn’t care for it either.

Like Liked by 2 people

I meant more in terms of scope and depth as a work of historical fiction rather than a direct comparison of story with The Nightingale. I personally loved the Nightingale more than this one too, but it’s not until this release that I feel she has written something on that level again. Thanks for stopping by, always interested to hear what people think on a book – good and bad!

Your review insightfully captures this depressing but important book about the Dust Bowl and Depression. An eyeopener for me, an educated (M.A. degree), 80 year old woman who knew nothing about this era except that there was a drought (what a mild word for what Americans endured!). I disagree with your take on Loreda as being an over-characterized, angry teenager. I thought Kristin Hannah paints her perfectly; idealizing one parent, trashing the other. Isn’t that a lot of what teen life is about? Hannah’s resolution in Loreda is beautifully done – weaving Loreda’s guilt with her age appropriate rage. I was relieved (and maybe a bit dismayed) that Loreda didn’t get raped along the way, allowing us (and her) to keep on going (and growing) without being stopped short by a trauma that would make her struggle to survive that disastrous era, totally unbearable (and probably do her in altogether). My only criticism of the book is that the characters’ quotes in the first part (until the Dust hits) sounded artificial. Hannah has Loreda and Ant saying things that are jarringly too grown up and artificial sounding. But that stops as soon as the action really begins. Monica

Thank you for your thoughts, I appreciate the time you’ve taken to comment in-depth. I think my impressions of Loreda may have been coloured by having read Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah not all that long before this one. In that one too, there is a similar teenager, although possibly worse in terms of the nastiness to her mother. It might have just been too much, a case of, not this again! I definitely didn’t appreciate her as much as you did but I am taken with your thoughts here on her. You’ve given me something to think about.

I found your review by googling “The Four Winds, is Loreda horrible through the whole book.” I loathe the Loreda character too. In fact, I’m only about 1/4 through the book and am debating whether to continue because she is features so heavily and I dislike her so much. I almost never give up on a book and can’t believe I am even considering it – especially since this one is written by an author I like and set in a time period I seek out in historical fiction. But I just don’t know if I can tolerate Loreda for another 300 pages.

Loreda is extremely intolerable, she did make the book a challenging read, along with it being an overwhelmingly depressing story. Maybe go with your instinct here – there are so many other good books out there that don’t cause so much ire whilst reading!

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The Four Winds : Book summary and reviews of The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

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The Four Winds

by Kristin Hannah

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Published Feb 2021 464 pages Genre: Historical Fiction Publication Information

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About this book

Book summary.

From Kristin Hannah, 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.

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"[A] riveting story of love, courage, and sacrifice...Hannah combines gritty realism with emotionally rich characters and lyrical prose that rings brightly and true...In Elsa, a woman who fiercely defends her principles and those she loves, Hannah brilliantly revives the ghost of Tom Joad." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Outstanding...[A] rich, rewarding read about family ties, perseverance, and women's friendships and fortitude." - Booklist (starred review) "The pedantic aims of the novel are hard to ignore as Hannah embodies her history lesson in what feels like a series of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd emotions. For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry." - Kirkus Reviews "Through one woman's survival during the harsh and haunting Dust Bowl, master storyteller, Kristin Hannah, reminds us that the human heart and our Earth are as tough, yet as fragile, as a change in the wind. This mother's soul, suffering the same drought as the land, attempts to cross deserts and beat starvation to save her children with a fierce inner strength called motherhood. A timely novel highlighting the worth and delicate nature of Nature itself." - Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing

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Kristin Hannah is an award-winning international number one bestselling author with over 25 million copies of her books sold worldwide. Her most recent titles, The Four Winds, The Nightingale and The Great Alone won numerous best fiction awards and her earlier novel, Firefly Lane , is currently a bestselling series on Netflix. Kristin is a lawyer-turned-writer and is the mother of one son. She and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest near Seattle.

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Book review: The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

Title: The Four Winds

Author: Kristin Hannah

Genre: Historical Fiction

Publisher: Macmillan

Publication date: 2nd February 2021

My rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

“Texas, 1921. A time of abundance. The Great War is over, the bounty of the land is plentiful, and America is on the brink of a new and optimistic era. But for Elsa Wolcott, deemed too old to marry in a time when marriage is a woman’s only option, the future seems bleak. Until the night she meets Rafe Martinelli and decides to change the direction of her life. With her reputation in ruin, there is only one respectable choice: marriage to a man she barely knows.

By 1934, the world has changed; millions are out of work and drought has devastated the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as crops fail and water dries up and the earth cracks open. Dust storms roll relentlessly across the plains. Everything on the Martinelli farm is dying, including Elsa’s tenuous marriage; each day is a desperate battle against nature and a fight to keep her children alive.

In this uncertain and perilous time, Elsa—like so many of her neighbors—must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or leave it behind and go west, to California, in search of a better life for her family.

The Four Winds is a rich, sweeping novel that stunningly brings to life the Great Depression and the people who lived through it—the harsh realities that divided us as a nation and the enduring battle between the haves and the have-nots. A testament to hope, resilience, and the strength of the human spirit to survive adversity, 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.”

The Four Winds narrates the bitter and heartbreaking story of the dangers, hardships and tragedies that millions of people across the United States faced during the Great Depression. Following the Martinelli family through a treacherous journey from the Great Plains to southern California, the reader is immersed into a riveting storyline full of ups and downs that profoundly reveal what it means to be human.

I was immediately drawn to the main character, Elsa, who is described by others as plain and dull but soon shows to possess many wonderful qualities as a mother and later on as a leader. Even though her life is filled with misfortune and trouble from an early age, she never ceases to amaze with her determination to provide the best possible life to her family. Her wonderful children and parents-in-law were all beautifully developed and multi-layered characters and I also enjoyed getting to know the other minor characters that were introduced later in the book when the family moved to California.

The journey across the US is not an easy one for Elsa and her children as they come across hunger, poverty and many people with ill intentions. Kristin Hannah is brilliant at storytelling and, just like her past books, she is a master at making the reader feel completely immersed in the plot and connected with the characters. It was hard to read certain parts in the book and witness the struggles this family, and many others, lived through. However, the courage and resilience that each character showed during these moments of hardship were incredible and there were several distinct moments in the book that are hard to forget.

Few books have made me stop and reflect on life, but somehow Kristin Hannah’s books are always at the top of that list. Although my heart felt heavy while reading most of this book, I cannot recommend it enough. This period was an incredibly difficult time for many and is often underrepresented in books so I am pleased to see it highlighted in The Four Winds. It’s a poignant story with wonderful characters that should be read by all, even those who may not originally think of reading a Historical Fiction book. I cannot wait for the next book by this author as I already know that it would be another great read.

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Book review: the skylark’s secret by fiona valpy, blog tour: crossing in time by d.l. orton, book review: dark matter by blake crouch, one comment.

Wonderful review, Darina! This one definitely seems like a powerful book and a must-read. I’ve heard a lot about Kristin Hannah’s books but still haven’t read any yet. It’s lovely to see your reviews appear on my feed again, I hope you are doing well! 😊

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The Four Winds Kristin Hannah

By: Author Jen - MMB Book Blog

Posted on Published: 23 September 2022  - Last updated: 8 March 2024

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Kristin Hannah never fails to move me with her stories. The Nightingale and The Great Alone both left a lasting impression on me.

The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah was published in 2021 and was an instant New York Times   number one bestseller and a 2022 Richard and Judy Book Club Pick .

The Four Winds Kristin Hannah: Plot

After a childhood of rejection, Elsa Martinelli has finally a place to call home. She has a family she adores and she enjoys her work on the family farm on the Great Plains.

However, in 1934, drought threatens everything Elsa has worked so hard to build. Facing poverty, her husband abandons Elsa and their children, in search of a better life for himself.

Devastated, Elsa must now make a heartbreaking decision. Stay and fight for the land she loves so much, or travel to California, where opportunities will surely be easier to come by.

Desperate to make the right decision for the health and future of her family, Elsa has to draw on every ounce of strength she possesses.

The Four Winds Kristin Hannah: My Opinion

Kristin Hannah’s writing never fails to move me. I love how she takes her time telling the story, drawing the reader in as she creates characters you can really care about.

The Four Winds was no exception. I empathised with Elsa, and her determination to do right by her family. As a mother, I can’t even imagine how terrifying her options were.

Elsa was strong and tenacious, although it took her a very long time to realise that herself. Her obsession with her looks, and how “ugly” she was, became a little irritating at times, but it highlighted just how much the lack of affection had impacted her confidence.

As with the other Kristin Hannah books I’ve read, this novel was beautifully written. The beauty of the writing contrasts starkly against the bleakness of the actual story. I lingered over quite a few lines throughout the book, including this one:

“Love is what remains when everything else is gone.”

It perfectly highlighted Elsa’s love for her children as every material belonging was taken away from her.

I previously knew very little about The Dust Bowl during the Great Depression in the 20th century and it was just so harrowing to read. Not just the part nature played in the devastating droughts, but also the cruelties dealt at the hands of their fellow humans.

I did feel that the author threw every awful experience she could think of at poor Elsa. It felt very bleak at times and I was just willing for happier times to arrive.

All the Kristin Hannah novels I’ve read have explored female relationships really well. I found the mother/daughter relationship between Elsa and her daughter to be really believable. There was tension and frustration, but the love was always there.

I found The Four Winds to be another hugely moving book by Kristin Hannah that will stay with me long after finishing it.

Related Books

• The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
• The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah
• Another Life by Kristin Hannah

Related Book Lists

• Kristin Hannah Books in Order
• Lucinda Riley Books in Order

Jen is the owner and writer of MMB Book Blog. A lifelong bookworm, she aims to provide readers with literary inspiration in the form of book guides, reading lists and more.

As the daughter of a librarian Jen’s love of books started from a very early age. Her reading obsession continued throughout her teenage years when she studied both English Language and English Literature at college.

As an adult her love of reading has only increased and she can always be found with her head in a book.

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• Genre Fiction

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The Four Winds: A Novel Hardcover – February 2, 2021

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"The Bestselling Hardcover Novel of the Year."--Publishers Weekly From the number-one bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Great Alone comes a powerful American epic about love and heroism and hope, set during the Great Depression, a time when the country was in crisis and at war with itself, when millions were out of work and even the land seemed to have turned against them. “ My land tells its story if you listen. The story of our family .” Texas, 1921. A time of abundance. The Great War is over, the bounty of the land is plentiful, and America is on the brink of a new and optimistic era. But for Elsa Wolcott, deemed too old to marry in a time when marriage is a woman’s only option, the future seems bleak. Until the night she meets Rafe Martinelli and decides to change the direction of her life. With her reputation in ruin, there is only one respectable choice: marriage to a man she barely knows. By 1934, the world has changed; millions are out of work and drought has devastated the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as crops fail and water dries up and the earth cracks open. Dust storms roll relentlessly across the plains. Everything on the Martinelli farm is dying, including Elsa’s tenuous marriage; each day is a desperate battle against nature and a fight to keep her children alive. In this uncertain and perilous time, Elsa―like so many of her neighbors―must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or leave it behind and go west, to California, in search of a better life for her family. The Four Winds is a rich, sweeping novel that stunningly brings to life the Great Depression and the people who lived through it―the harsh realities that divided us as a nation and the enduring battle between the haves and the have-nots. A testament to hope, resilience, and the strength of the human spirit to survive adversity, 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.

• Print length 464 pages
• Language English
• Publisher St. Martin's Press
• Publication date February 2, 2021
• Dimensions 6.62 x 1.41 x 9.99 inches
• ISBN-10 1250178606
• ISBN-13 978-1250178602
• See all details

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"The Bestselling Hardcover Novel of the Year."--Publishers Weekly Book of the Month Club's Best Book of 2021 Selected for The Texas Library Association's 2022 Lariat Adult Fiction Reading List " The Four Winds seems eerily prescient in 2021 . . . Its message is galvanizing and hopeful: We are a nation of scrappy survivors. We’ve been in dire straits before; we will be again. Hold your people close.” ― The New York Times "A spectacular tour de force that shines a spotlight on the indispensable but often overlooked role of Greatest Generation women." ―People "Brutally beautiful." ― Newsweek "Epic and transporting, a stirring story of hardship and love...Majestic and absorbing." ― USA Today "Through one woman’s survival during the harsh and haunting Dust Bowl, master storyteller, Kristin Hannah, reminds us that the human heart and our Earth are as tough, yet as fragile, asa change in the wind. This mother’s soul, suffering the same drought as the land, attempts to cross deserts and beat starvation to save her children with a fierce inner strength called motherhood. A timely novel highlighting the worth and delicate nature of Nature itself." ―Delia Owens, author of WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING "A powerful, stirring, wind-swept tale set in Depression-era America that makes your heart break and soar in equal measure. An escape into the past with timely echoes to the present. Kristin Hannah is a classic storyteller and The Four Winds sees her at the top of her game.” -- MATT HAIG, New York Times bestselling author of THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY "Wow. I have been left with a bursting heart. Prepare to go on a journey. The story of Elsa and her family will sweep you up on its wings and plunge you to the depths of feeling. This novel is crucial for our times: although set during the Great Depression and the terrible dust bowls, it holds up a mirror to our current world and asks us to look and to understand deeply. It is a story of migration, poverty, prejudice - it shines a light on a crisis that is all too real in today’s world. Yet, it is also a story of love, family, unbreakable bonds, bravery and hope. I will never forget the characters, what they endured and how they hoped and loved. I feel that I will be forever touched by them. I loved this book so much!" -- Christy Lefteri, author of THE BEEKEEPER OF ALEPPO " The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah is a captivating, heartbreaking tale of a family who will do anything for each other ― and everything to survive. The strength of Hannah’s prose brings the characters to life in a way that will make you unable to tear yourself away from them. You will celebrate their triumphs, mourn their tragedies, and commend their bravery. Through it all, it is easy to feel Hannah’s desire to honor those who lived and fought through this devastating time in history. The Four Winds is also an ode to the strength and ferocity of mothers, and a declaration that sometimes, love is the only thing that holds us together. Above all else, The Four Winds is merely a really good story, one that hits you in all the right places and will keep surprising you until the end." ― Associated Press "One woman’s journey exemplifies the hard choices families faced when confronted with survival versus a sense of home." ― GoodMorningAmerica.com "Hannah brings Dust Bowl migration to life in this riveting story of love, courage, and sacrifice...combines gritty realism with emotionally rich characters and lyrical prose that rings brightly and true from the first line" ― Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Outstanding.... [A] rich, rewarding read about family ties, perseverance, and women's friendships and fortitude." ― Booklist (starred review) "The Four Winds is a sweeping epic about an American struggling to keep her family afloat. It feels eerily timely as it highlights the ways women rally during a national crisis." ― Real Simple " A heartbreaking but beautiful story of sacrifice, courage, love, and hope. Grab the tissues." ― The Skimm

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ St. Martin's Press; First Edition (February 2, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250178606
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250178602
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.62 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.62 x 1.41 x 9.99 inches
• #143 in Mothers & Children Fiction
• #335 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction
• #555 in Historical Fiction (Books)

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About the author

Kristin hannah.

Kristin Hannah is the award-winning and bestselling author of more than 20 novels. Her newest novel, The Women, about the nurses who served in the Vietnam war, will be released on February 6, 2024.

The Four Winds was published in February of 2021 and immediately hit #1 on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Indie bookstore's bestseller lists. Additionally, it was selected as a book club pick by the both Today Show and The Book Of the Month club, which named it the best book of 2021.

In 2018, The Great Alone became an instant New York Times #1 bestseller and was named the Best Historical Novel of the Year by Goodreads.

In 2015, The Nightingale became an international blockbuster and was Goodreads Best Historical fiction novel for 2015 and won the coveted People's Choice award for best fiction in the same year. It was named a Best Book of the Year by Amazon, iTunes, Buzzfeed, the Wall Street Journal, Paste, and The Week.

The Nightingale is currently in pre-production at Tri Star. Firefly Lane, her beloved novel about two best friends, was the #1 Netflix series around the world, in the week it came out. The popular tv show stars Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke.

A former attorney, Kristin lives in the Pacific Northwest.

www.kristinhannah.com

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The Four Winds

Description.

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.

Analysis of the first line of "The Four Winds" by Kristin Hannah

"Hope is a coin I carry"

What does the first line signify - Evocative Imagery

The opening line uses vivid imagery by likening hope to a coin. This comparison immediately conjures a mental image of something tangible and valuable that the narrator carries with them. It suggests that hope is a precious and enduring resource.

Symbolism of Hope

The word "Hope" is capitalized, emphasizing its importance and suggesting that it might be a central theme in the book. This hints that the narrative might explore the power and significance of hope in the face of challenges or adversity.

Personal Connection

The use of the pronoun "I" makes the statement personal, indicating that the narrator is intimately connected to this hope. It could imply that hope is not just an abstract concept but something deeply personal and meaningful to the character.

Intrigue and Mystery

The line is somewhat enigmatic, as it doesn't immediately reveal the context or circumstances in which hope is carried. This can pique the reader's curiosity, encouraging them to delve further into the story to understand the significance of this hope and how it will be tested or explored.

Foreshadowing

The opening line may serve as a foreshadowing device, hinting at themes and events that will unfold in the story. It suggests that hope may play a pivotal role in the characters' lives and the plot's development.

In summary, the first line of "The Four Winds" by Kristin Hannah effectively draws the reader in with its evocative imagery, symbolism of hope, and a sense of personal connection. It sets the stage for a narrative that explores the role of hope in the characters' lives and the challenges they may face.

Analysing the book's title

The title of Kristin Hannah's novel, "The Four Winds," carries symbolism and hints at various elements of the story.

Natural Imagery

"The Four Winds" immediately invokes natural imagery. The "winds" suggest a powerful and elemental force of nature. This choice of imagery can foreshadow the role of nature and the environment in the story. It might signify the impact of weather, climate, or geography on the characters' lives.

Symbolic Significance

In literature, the "four winds" often symbolize the cardinal directions: north, south, east, and west. Each direction can represent different aspects of life or human experience. For example, north might symbolize adversity, south could signify hope or change, east might represent a new beginning, and west could imply a journey or destination. The title's use of "four winds" may suggest that the novel explores various facets of life, journey, or change.

Journey and Change

The word "winds" also implies movement and change. It can evoke a sense of journey, whether physical or metaphorical. This suggests that the story may involve characters going through significant transformations or embarking on journeys that shape their lives.

Historical Context

"The Four Winds" is set during the Dust Bowl era in the United States during the Great Depression. The title may be a reference to the harsh weather conditions and dust storms that plagued the region during that time. It underscores the historical and environmental challenges faced by the characters.

Epic Quality

The title has an epic quality to it, suggesting that the novel might have a sweeping and expansive narrative. It hints at a story that encompasses a wide range of experiences, emotions, and challenges.

Metaphorical Resilience

The title may also symbolize the resilience and strength of the characters. Just as the four winds are forces of nature that cannot be controlled, the characters may face circumstances beyond their control and must find ways to endure and adapt.

In summary, "The Four Winds" is a title that carries rich symbolism and suggests themes of nature, journey, change, and resilience. It provides readers with a sense of the novel's scope and hints at the challenges and transformations the characters may undergo within the context of historical and environmental adversity.

Analysing the theme of the novel

"The Four Winds" by Kristin Hannah explores several interconnected themes, which are central to the novel's narrative and character development. Here are some of the key themes in the book:

Resilience and Survival

At its core, the novel is a story of survival and resilience. Set during the Dust Bowl era of the Great Depression, the characters face extreme hardship and environmental challenges. They must adapt, endure, and find the inner strength to persevere in the face of adversity. The theme of resilience is exemplified through the characters' ability to withstand the harsh conditions and make difficult choices for the sake of survival.

Family and Sacrifice

Family is a central theme in "The Four Winds." The protagonist, Elsa Martinelli, is a mother who must make profound sacrifices to protect and provide for her family. The novel explores the lengths to which individuals are willing to go to protect their loved ones and the enduring bonds that hold families together in times of crisis.

Social Injustice and Economic Disparity

The novel delves into the social and economic injustices of the era, particularly the vast disparity between the wealthy and the impoverished. It highlights the struggles of the working class and the desperation of those who are marginalized by society. The characters' experiences shed light on the challenges faced by ordinary people during the Great Depression.

Environmental Destruction

The Dust Bowl serves as a backdrop to the story, and the environmental theme is prevalent throughout the novel. It explores the consequences of human actions on the environment and how natural disasters can exacerbate human suffering. The characters' connection to the land and their efforts to survive in a harsh climate are integral to the narrative.

The American Dream

"The Four Winds" examines the concept of the American Dream and its attainability during a time of economic turmoil. Elsa and other characters in the novel grapple with their dreams of a better life, highlighting the tension between aspiration and reality in the face of widespread poverty and hardship.

Empowerment and Independence

As the story progresses, Elsa undergoes personal growth and transformation. She evolves from a timid and obedient wife into a strong and independent woman who takes charge of her destiny. The theme of empowerment underscores the importance of self-determination and the pursuit of one's dreams.

Community and Solidarity

Despite the harsh circumstances, the characters in the novel form close-knit communities and support networks. The theme of solidarity underscores the importance of coming together, helping one another, and finding strength in unity during times of crisis.

Overall, "The Four Winds" weaves together these themes to create a powerful and emotionally charged narrative that explores the human spirit's capacity to endure, adapt, and find hope in the face of overwhelming challenges. Through the characters' experiences, the novel offers a poignant commentary on the resilience of individuals and communities during a turbulent period in American history.

DISCLAIMER: This content is generated by ChatGPT.

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