Social media, book bloggers, and Read With Jenna Book Club have been murmuring about The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah for a couple of months. I got my toe wet with this title, jumped in, and loved every page! It is a fictional story about an incredibly resilient woman and her family that takes place from 1921-1944 from the beginning and through the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in Texas. The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken Southern Plain regions when dry winds and storms greatly damaged the farmland. It proved to be a history lesson to me, as well.
The protagonist is Elsa Martinelli but the book also has a list of characters that shape it into an epic story about family, survival, perseverance, and love. During the turmoil and destruction of the devastating Dust Bowl storms, Elsa needed to make some painstaking decisions that changed her family’s lives forever. There are many ebbs-and-flows that allow this story to develop which I don’t want to spoil if you have yet to read it, but I want to share why I think this title is a great one to fall into.
This book is the perfect one to read as we live through the tail end of this pandemic because it seems to parallel other tragic time periods our country had to endure. There are similar hardships like massive unemployment, natural enemies we can’t control, and the physical toll of living in an uncertain world. The pure grit of Elsa and her family made me stop in my tracks and think about how we’ve been living our lives the past year. What the author portrayed day-to-day life was like for these families was incredibly heartbreaking and, believe it or not, that’s what I loved about this book. It allowed me to recognize all that we have today and how incredibly brave the people that endured the Great Depression and Dust Bowl storms lived and persevered.
I am so glad that I read this even though, at times, as a mom, it was hard to swallow. If I’m having a difficult day, I need to think about Elsa, her brave soul, and how the generations that came before struggled with just staying above water just to, literally, stay alive. Read this book. It’s good for the soul.
