The Four Winds, by Kristin Hannah (2021)
Audio Book CD format – Reviewed by: Dawn Bechtel, avid Andover reader (listener)
About the author:
Kristin Hannah age 61 is an award-winning and bestselling author of more than 20 novels. Kristin is a former-lawyer-turned writer who lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband.
The story:
Texas in 1921 was a time of abundance. The Great War was over, and crops were plentiful people prospered. For Elsa Wolcott, considered by the time too old to marry 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, millions are out of work and the Great Plains is failing in the midst of a devastating drought. Farmers fight to keep their land and their livelihoods as water dries up and the earth cracks open. Horrible dust storms roll across the plains, people are dying. Everything on the Martinelli farm is dying, including Elsa’s marriage; each day is a desperate battle against nature and a fight to keep her children alive. This is the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression.
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.
Book Quotes:
“Elsa knew that a library card—a thing they’d taken for granted all of their lives—meant there was still a future.” ― Kristin Hannah, The Four Winds
“Books had always been her solace; novels gave her the space to be bold, brave, beautiful, if only in her own imagination.” ― Kristin Hannah, The Four Winds
“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
My Review:
For Kristin Hannah fans, you won’t be disappointed in her newest book. I listened to this on audiobook and the narration was wonderful. This book brings in so much from family expectations to self-liberation; living well to fighting for breath; the weakness of man and the strength of women; friendship and motherhood; the prosperity and cruelty of a change in weather. This book will hold you and keep you, such a well-written story of sacrifice, courage, and hope.