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| Categories | Genre Fiction |
| Author | Kristin Hannah |
| Publisher | Griffin (March 14, 2023) |
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 480 pages |
| Item Weight | 2.31 pounds |
| Dimensions |
5.35 x 1.2 x 8.15 inches |
I. Book introduction
“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.
Synopsis
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.
About Kristin Hannah
Kristin Hannah (born September 25, 1960) is an American writer. Her most notable works include Winter Garden, The Nightingale, Firefly Lane, The Great Alone, and The Four Winds. In 2024, St. Martin’s Publishing Group published her novel, The Women, which is set in America in the 1960s.
Kristin Hannah was born in California. After graduating with a degree in communication from the University of Washington, Hannah worked at an advertising agency in Seattle. She graduated from the University of Puget Sound law school and practiced law in Seattle before becoming a full-time writer. Hannah wrote her first novel with her mother, who was dying of cancer at the time, but the book was never published.
Hannah’s best-selling work, The Nightingale, has sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide and has been published in 45 languages.
Hannah lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington, with her husband and their son.
II. Reviewer: The Four Winds
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1. EMILY MAY reviews for 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’s books seem to get pigeonholed as “women’s fiction”, whatever that means, but the three books I’ve read from her – The Nightingale, The Great Alone, and this one – have all been, for me, nothing short of survival stories.
The theme of women surviving impossible times runs through all three of the books I’ve read by Hannah. She often focuses on cross-generational bonds, between older and younger women who usually have complex relationships with one another. The Nightingale focused on the women left fighting their own war at home in France during the German occupation. The Great Alone follows a mother and daughter into the Alaskan wilderness, as they fight off threats from outside and within their small cabin.
The Four Winds is set during dust bowl era Texas, and focuses on Elsa Martinelli and her daughter as they try to survive the complete destruction of life as they knew it.
You know, before reading this book, I thought I understood what happened during the dust bowl and the Great Depression. I read The Grapes of Wrath some years ago and we skimmed over it in school. But clearly I did not appreciate the horrors that took place, especially in the dust-ravaged lands of Northern Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico. I did not know, or did not remember, that people slept in gas masks or else woke with their eyes crusted shut and their throats caked in dirt. I did not know how many died from dust pneumonia.
In this book, Elsa has carved out a piece of paradise for herself– a loving family, a land to farm and be proud of, and a mother-in-law whose initial suspicion quickly turns to affection. Then the land turns on them. Everything dies. There’s no food to feed themselves, never mind the few animals they need to keep their farm going. And then Elsa’s son becomes gravely ill, and she must decide whether to stick it out and hope for an end to this hell, or leave on a perilous journey west to California.
It’s just a real great story about a family trying to survive. I loved Elsa immediately, her fire and her weaknesses, and I wanted so badly for her to get her family to safety. The trials never stop, though, and after doing a bit more outside reading on the dust bowl, I can see there was nothing remarkable about Elsa’s story, even if, to me, it sounds completely outrageous.
The Four Winds is not a short book, but I ate it up. I was so absorbed in the story that I felt annoyed every time real life disturbed my reading. This book just cemented Kristin Hannah as a must-read author for me.
2. MAUREEN reviews for The Four Winds
Forgive my indulgence by starting this review on a personal note, but as a child, my parents had a saying – “Never judge a person’s life story by the chapter you find them in”. It was said with kindness and concern for others’ misfortunes, and never was this more pertinent than in The Four Winds!
1930’s Texas, the dust bowl, the stock market crash, and for the farmers across The Great Plains, came burning winds that destroyed everything in their path, and a drought so fierce that it left wheat fields so severely blasted by heat that they couldn’t be harvested, the collapse of the economy – everything that nature and life could throw at these poor unfortunate people was thrown, and life as they knew it was gone.
It is against this backdrop that we meet Elsa Martinelli, on the face of it an unremarkable woman, struggling with the question, should she stay on the home farm and keep struggling, waiting for the rains that never come, this is an area she has known her whole life, or should she take her two children and try her luck out West? Well, the decision Elsa takes, turns this unremarkable woman into one to be proud of, someone who shows us that in adversity, we can reveal the warrior who’s been hiding within.
The hardship, the sheer grinding poverty and its effects, are hard to witness here, in addition, the prejudice shown to these people who were just trying to put food on the table for their families, was shameful. Here we discovered others who were better off, who hadn’t known a day’s hardship in their lives, doing their best to grind these poor unfortunate people’s pride into the gutter – that’s if they still had any pride left to grind, after all that they’d suffered. However, the overriding message that comes across is that human beings can survive against all the odds, and that love for one’s family survives everything.
This is an epic read that is undoubtedly heartbreaking, but it’s stunning, and so beautifully written that I will take Elsa Martinelli with me in my heart for some time to come. Don’t miss this one!
*I was invited to read The Four Winds by the publisher and have given an honest unbiased review in exchange *
3. ANGELA reviews for The Four Winds
4.5 stars
“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.”
Kristin Hannah has written a number of novels and I’ve read several. In my view, her strength lies in historical fiction. This novel depicting the trials of so many people in the Dust Bowl in Texas and other places during the 1930’s, and the Dust Bowl Migration, who endured the horrible effects on their lives, is another example of how she excels in this genre.
Elsa, at twenty three has lived a sheltered life having suffered from rheumatic fever as a young girl, treated as an invalid and outsider by an uncaring family. She reads and she’s restless to live and wants more of a life. She does get another life, but it’s a difficult one filled with heartache, unbearable heat and dust you could taste, and a livelihood with her beautiful and loving in-laws that is in peril. In the midst of the Great Depression on top of all of the natural disasters, she takes her two children to California in hopes of a better life. What she finds there is a harrowing existence of poverty, horrible living conditions and slave like working conditions. But she also finds friendship that she never knew, love that she dreamed of, but never thought possible, and a role in the fight for workers’ rights.
Hannah tells us in a note that Elsa is a fictional character, but she represents the resilience and strength in the wake of seemingly uncontrollable circumstances of so many real people who lived through these times. Like most good historical fiction, reading this had me looking for information about this place and time and these events. Hannah has done justice to these times with characters to care about and a captivating story and a realistic portrayal of this slice of American history. Not quite 5 stars because I felt at times it was a little drawn out, but highly recommended for historical fiction lovers, especially. This is a heartbreaking story that had me in tears in the end, but yet the hope of the penny remained.
I received an advanced copy of this book from St. Martin’s Press through
Edelweiss and NetGalley
4. PAROMJIT reviews for The Four Winds
This is epic historical fiction from Kristin Hannah, a harrowing, tough and painful read of one of American history’s darkest period, the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, the tragedies, poverty, starvation, unemployment, the sacrifices made, set in Texas and California from the early 1920s up to WW2. It is impeccably well researched with all its excruciating details, an era seen through the eyes of a woman, a mother, and her family. The tall Elsinore or ‘Elsa’ has suffered poor health, is from a wealthy family who make her feel she is never as good as her sisters, never loved, that results in her poor self esteem. So when she receives attention from a younger man, Rafe Martinelli, she ends up pregnant, and despite him being already engaged, they find themselves married.
Elsa finds herself living on a farm, loved and thriving, despite it being a hard life of challenges, getting on well with her in-laws, Tony and Rosa, particularly close to Rosa, with two children, Loreda and Ant. However, living conditions become unbearable, particularly for the farming communities with the Depression, the lack of rain, the never ending drought, the failing crops and the devastating dust storms and their dreadful impact, leading to people scattering in the winds. Despite everything, for obvious reasons Elsa is reluctant to leave until the life threatening conditions worsen considerably, and they move to where it is said is the land of milk and honey, California. In a relentlessly downbeat and bleak narrative, California is far from the promised land, instead they face endless prejudice and injustice.
Elsa is a mother, a strong, courageous and indomitable woman, there is nothing she will not do for her children, the hardest of workers, in a California that exploits, with terrible working conditions and pay. Despite everything, despite the horrors, what shines through is the underlying power of the human spirit, its astonishing capacity to endure the worst of times, the despair, and survive, against all the odds. Hannah’s novel speaks to, parallels, and echoes our contemporary realities, the pandemic and its crushing impact, men in power that cannot be trusted, a divided nation, and a future that looks so bleak, offering hope by illustrating people’s resilience from the past. As you might well have gathered, this is clearly not the easiest of reads, so heartbreaking, but it is nevertheless powerful, compelling and riveting, of women and their relationships, a book for our times, and a historical education too. Many thanks to Pan Macmillan for an ARC.
5. SAM reviews for The Four Winds
Gut-wrenching and beautiful
If you know me, you know I don’t give or give star ratings easily. This is a story that will stick with me.
Kristin Hannah’s writing is perfection. She makes me feel like I’m right there with the main characters in the best and worst ways. I felt all the pain and heartache and frustration and longing so deeply I honestly had to take breaks at times.
Whether you like historical fiction or not, I cannot recommend this enough! Books like this are why I love to read ❤️
6. LORI reviews for The Four Winds
American Warrior
This story was so powerful, so rich. I love historical fiction and this book didn’t disappoint. A family rich in love that held together during the most difficult of times. A story of strength and perseverance during the Great Depression where a young mother drove her two children from the Great Plains out West to California hoping for a better life but only to be treated like vagrants by their fellow Americans. I couldn’t put this book down. I will remember the strength of these characters for some time to come. Kristin Hannah is such an amazing author!
Highly recommended!!
7. JJSPINA reviews for The Four Winds
An unforgettable historical novel of epic proportions!
The Four Winds is an epic historical novel that takes the reader back to The Great Depression and a family who suffered through it all. This involves the greatest generation of all, for they were the strongest, most resilient and determined to make a life for themselves despite the dire circumstances of nature, other events, and heartache.
This was a tough book to read because it involved so much heartbreak as the author takes us through the daily life of this family and all their struggles. The main protagonist Elsa is a woman who has been unloved by her family, mistreated by her husband and not accepted by her daughter. All Elsa wants is to love and be loved, something that she has desperately needed all her life. She struggles to be a good wife, mother, and eventual daughter-in-law when she moves in with her in-laws after being ostracized by her parents when she realizes she is pregnant.
Elsa discovers that she is loved and needed by her mother- and father-in-law but not appreciated by her husband for what she is, a hard worker who is determined to make a good life for herself and her family. It was difficult to watch Elsa with her struggles and how she never gave up even after her husband abandoned her and their two children.
There is mention of how the immigrants from one state to another were mistreated and shunned by others, exploited by the cotton and fruit plantations, and forced to grovel and somehow survive reminiscent of some of the problems in our society today.
An unforgettable and epic read that I highly recommend. Be prepared to feel the heart wrenching despair of the characters told expertly through this amazing author’s prose.
8. LINDA reviews for The Four Winds
Better than the Nightingale
I gave this novel a try after all the positive accolades. I wasn’t expecting much, but was hoping it would be better than the Nightgale, which was a generous 4/5 for me. This met and exceeded my expectations. It’s much better written, very gripping, with flawed characters that you want to root for. There is so much history and I loved learning what I wasn’t taught in school. The daily hardships of life at that time and in that region were brought to life in such a moving way. The struggles of a single mother were so eloquently developed and described. The dialogues felt real and human. This kind of book makes you appreciate life in the 21st century, and be grateful for all the things we take for granted.
To those giving this book a low rating because of the ending: 1) grow up; 2) perhaps you should stick to the Hallmark channel; 3) what better ending than your child achieving what you wished them to be when they were born?
You won’t regret reading this one.
9. JESSICA reviews for The Four Winds
whenever i think of the dust bowl era, i have traumatic flashbacks of reading ‘the grapes of wrath’ in high school. not the best experience, so ive kind of unintentionally avoided the topic ever since.
but im so glad i decided to give this a chance. i definitely connected more with the writing, the characters, and the overall story in this book.
what really got me was how much i empathised with elsa. im not a mother, but i found it remarkable just how fully i could understand the love she felt for her children and the lengths she would go to provide for them. i even found my eyes misting up on a few occasions. its definitely the great writing and characterisation which made that possible.
this is one more story KH can add to her list of ‘books that will make my readers feel something.’
↠ 4.5 stars
10. THERESA ALAN reviews for The Four Winds
I’d wanted a book that would make me cry, and this one really delivered. The hardships faced by Elsa are simply relentless. This is a good novel for the era of Covid when many Americans are publicly bitching about having to wear their masks at the Walmart–read this and you will stop complaining.
The story is set at the same time as The Grapes of Wrath: the Great Depression combined with the Dust Bowl. Now I’m going to have to re-read that novel, although this is a wonderful story from the point of view of a female of that era. The hardships she faces make wearing a mask at the grocery store seem pretty easy, and it’s a good reminder to be grateful for all the many ways our lives are no where near as bad as what Elsa and her family have to face.
The Texas panhandle is one of the places that the Dust Bowl decimated farms, so eventually Elsa takes her children west to California, the land of milk and honey, where there is supposed to be tons of work for everybody. One of the big money makers for migrants was picking cotton—I had no idea that’s ever been a crop in California. They face disgusting discrimination from the settled Californians because of how they have to live to scrape by. “People get scared when they lose their jobs, and they tend to blame outsiders. The first step is to call them criminals. The rest is easy.”
I highly recommend this novel. It’s wonderful.
III. The Four Winds Quotes
The best book quotes from The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah
“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.”
“Courage is fear you ignore.”
“It wasn’t the fear that mattered in life. It was the choices made when you were afraid. You were brave because of your fear, not in spite of it.”
“Love is what remains when everything else is gone.”
“Books had always been her solace; novels gave her the space to be bold, brave, beautiful, if only in her own imagination.”
“Don’t worry about dying, Elsa. Worry about not living. Be brave.” – Grandpa Wolcott”
“You are of me, Loreda, in a way that can never be broken. You taught me love. You, first in the whole world, and my love for you will outlive me.”
“I am in awe of her fire. Even if I’m the one she sets on fire.”
“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.”
“You are of me, Loreda, in a way that can never be broken. Not by words or anger or actions or time. I love you. I will always love you.”
“I say folks who hang on to the past miss their chance for a future.”
“Apparently you couldn’t stop loving some people, or needing their love, even when you knew better.”
“Elsa knew that a library card—a thing they’d taken for granted all of their lives—meant there was still a future.”
“The four winds have blown us here, people from all across the country, to the very end 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.”
“There was a pain that came with constant disapproval; a sense of having lost something unnamed, unknown. Elsa had survived it by being quiet, by not demanding or seeking attention, by accepting that she was loved, but unliked.”
“That was the first time her grandfather had leaned down and whispered, Be brave, into her ear. And then, Or pretend to be. It’s all the same.”
“my love for you will outlive me.”
“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. (p117)”
“We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. We shall endure. —CÉSAR CHÁVEZ”
“Although she hadn’t seen her parents for years, it turned out that a parent’s disapproval was a powerful, lingering voice that shaped and defined one’s self-image.”
“Passion is a thunderstorm, there and gone. It nourishes, si, but it drowns, too.”
“Jean reached over for Elsa’s hand and held it. Elsa hadn’t known until right then how much difference a friend could make. How one person could lift your spirit just enough to keep you upright.”
“Love. In the best of times, it is a dream. In the worst of times, a salvation.”
“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.”“She’d learned how to disappear in place long ago. She was like one of those animals whose defense mechanism is to blend into the landscape and become invisible. It was her way of dealing with rejection: Say nothing and disappear. Never fight back. If she remained quiet enough, people eventually forgot she was there and left her alone.”
“The things your parents say and the things your husband doesn’t say become a mirror, don’t they? You see yourself as they see you, and no matter how far you come, you bring that mirror with you.”
“Fear is smart until…” He headed for the door, paused as he reached for the knob. “Until what?” He looked back at her. “Until you realize you’re afraid of the wrong thing.”
“There was something she hadn’t known when she went into marriage and became a mother that she knew now: it was only possible to live without love when you’d never known it.”
“We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. We shall endure.”
“When times is tough and jobs is scarce, folks blame the outsider. It’s human nature.”
“Maybe that’s how God provides. He put me in your path and you in mine.”
“In the mirror, she’d seen more than her face. She’d seen the girl she’d been before all of this. A dreamer, a believer. Someone who would go places. How had she forgotten all of that?”
Excerpted from The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah
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