The Four Winds is the second novel that I have read that is written by Kristin Hannah. It is a good novel, but I did not feel the same emotional connection to it as I did with The Nightingale (ie. I did not bawl my eyes out at the end).

The Four Winds is set in the US during the Great Depression and is about a woman named Elsa Martinelli who is trying to survive on her husband’s family’s farm in the Dust Bowl area. Years of drought and severe dust storms have made it impossible for farmers to grow crops and make a living. Hannah’s description of Elsa and her family’s tribulations and of the dust storms is so evocative that I could taste the dirt that buried entire towns and killed people and animals; I felt the characters’ desperation as they wondered how they were supposed to survive another day with little food to eat and no money.

Tens of thousands of people were forced to leave their farms and head west to California where there was still the promise of jobs. Elsa struggles with the decision to do the same and take her two children far away from the only home they have ever known in Texas to the so-called “land of milk and honey”. Except the influx of migrants from other states was unexpected and overwhelmed California. There ended up not being enough jobs to go around and the state started to run out of welfare money to pay the migrants. In addition, the migrants faced discrimination from native Californias who resented the migrants’ presence in their state.

The migrants who were lucky enough to find jobs and shelter were usually with the big farming corporations run by American oligarchs who used the credit system to keep their workers indebted to them and brutally squashed any attempt of the workers organizing together to strike. The Great Depression was an incredibly hopeless time for people (except for the rich ones), and this hopelessness permeates The Four Winds. You know a book is good when it stirs up strong emotion in you, and The Four Winds has left me feeling angry at our general lack of empathy for each other and our refusal to learn from our past sufferings.

My only problem with The Four Winds is a problem completely of my own making. I am repulsed by meek protagonists (hence why Mansfield Park is my least favourite Jane Austen novel) and Elsa is for most of the novel a meek character. She is belittled and dismissed by her own parents which leads to her not being able to speak up for herself or express her feelings to her own husband and children. I could empathize with Elsa, but it took so long for her to develop into the kind of character that I could find engaging that I did not feel very affected by what happens with Elsa at the end of the novel. I still found the story itself to be engaging, and I encourage fans of historical fiction to read it. I am definitely going to continue to read Hannah’s novels.