Kristin Hannah’s book The Four Winds is a very recent publication. It appeared about a month ago, in February of 2021. The book has sold brilliantly and has piled up numerous good reviews, so I decided to give it a read. To read my other recent reviews, check out:

Deacon King Kong, by James McBride

Mistress of the Art of Death, by Ariana Franklin

Antonius, Son of Rome, by Brook Allen

The Four Winds is the story of the Martinelli family. They farm the Texas Panhandle during the 1920s and 1930s. Driven from their farm by the Dust Bowl, they head west to California to find a new life.

You’re probably already thinking: another The Grapes of Wrath. Well, that isn’t totally wrong. Hannah’s book has much in common with the John Steinbeck classic, plot-wise. I don’t know if the Martinelli family will become as famous as the Joad family. When they get their own Bruce Springsteen song, we’ll see.

But The Four Winds is the perfect example of what the publishing industry is about these days. The publishing industry doesn’t want new stories. It wants new versions of old stories that sold well. The Four Winds fits that bill perfectly. That doesn’t mean, however, that it isn’t a good book.

The Four Winds – Basic Plot

Elsa gets a rough start in life. She has heart problems as a young girl. This causes her quite traditional and conservative family to keep her inside permanently, supposedly out of fear for her health. So, when Elsa sneaks out one night, she hooks up with the first guy she meets. I wasn’t sure about this opening. I get the whole “I f*** on the first date” thing in the context of 2021, but 1921? On the other hand, if I’d lived my first 20+ years and rarely left my bedroom, maybe I’d feel the same.

In any case, soon Elsa is pregnant and gets exiled from her quite traditional and conservative family. She becomes a farmer and part of the Martinelli family instead, and by the 1930s this is a really, really bad thing in the Texas Panhandle. Heat. Dust. Storms. All at once, usually. Life is awful. Her son nearly dies from dust pneumonia. They leave for California. (I’ve skipped many things here but don’t want to spoil them. The plot has more twists than this, most of them good ones.) Throughout, Elsa struggles with a problem many people face—her internal doubts about herself vie with her need to provide the right example for her children.

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Evaluation of The Four Winds

Some things the author does very well. The scenes with the dust storms in Texas were excellent. In fact, her overall use of the environment to make the reader feel a part of the story ranks among the best I’ve read. Ms. Hannah also did a great job of making Elsa’s daughter into an angry teenager. Her depiction of the challenges faced by Okies, Arkies, and the other migrants to 1930s California is also superb. The next time someone asks me why the US needs a strong labor movement, I think I’ll ask them to read the second half of this book.

A few things didn’t feel quite right to me, however. The story skips from 1921 to 1934. That isn’t a problem, per se, except it leaves the reader with a mistaken impression about the state of farming in the US in the 1920s. The reader thinks “1920s, farming was fine” because things seem good in 1921. In reality, most of the 1920s was a struggle for farmers. Their Great Depression started in 1922 or so, not 1929 like the rest of the US. My next blog post will be about why this happened and how it caused the Dust Bowl.

An Archaic Sentimentality?

My other issue came from the fact the book had occasional passages like the following:

“Elsa had thought of the plains pioneers, people like Tony and Rose, as indomitable, invincible. People who had come to this vast, unknown country with nothing but a dream and who had tamed the land with grit and determination and hard work.”

As Luke Skywalker says to Rey in Episode 8 of Star Wars, “Impressive. Every word in that sentence was wrong.” It’s not that the farmers of the Great Plains were soft. Far from it. But let’s look closer.

Were they pioneers moving to a vast, unknown country? The Native Americans of the Great Plains would say otherwise. Were they even pioneers, truly? If the land looked empty, it’s because the US Army cleared out the native people, either by war or by (broken) treaty. As for being indomitable and invincible, Wallace Stegner reminds us that about two-thirds of the “pioneers” gave up on their farms without even staying for five years. This was even after they’d gotten their land for free from the US government via the Homestead Act. (Yes, free land from the government. How’s that for succeeding based only on initiative, grit, determination, and hard work?) As for taming the land, well, no. Dust storms, drought, and soil erosion. The Dust Bowl ranks as one of the six greatest ecological disasters in human history.

Now, granted, Elsa’s character probably did believe the passage I quoted was true. But the author should do better than to reinforce this sentimental nonsense here in 2021.

Score for the Book

Despite what I wrote above, I liked nearly everything else about The Four Winds. I’ve read several “best-selling” books with lots of hype in the last year or so, and this one probably comes the closest yet to delivering. If the reader can look past the book being somewhat derivative from The Grapes of Wrath, they’ll probably enjoy The Four Winds a great deal. It is a touch on the long side, about 450 pages as a paperback, but reads quickly most of the time. I will score this book 9 of 10. If you want to get a feel for one part of 1930s America, this book is a good choice. It’s vastly better than the other book I’ve read lately about 1930s America, This Tender Land.

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