The Style Your Modern Vintage Home: A Guide to Buying, Restoring and Styling from the 1920s to 1990s
Book
Style Your Modern Vintage Home is an inspirational book for all vintage enthusiasts. It encompasses...
Wunderlist: To-Do List & Tasks
Productivity and Business
App
Wunderlist is a simple to-do list and task manager app that helps you get stuff done. Whether...
Anonymous Browser for Tor - Onion Private Browsing
Productivity and Utilities
App
Browse anonymously on Tor and keep your web activity private & secure. Whether you want to visit...
Sociable - Meet, Chat, Play
Social Networking and Games
App
Meet new friends and boost your games scores while you play, chat, and have fun! Sociable is a fun...
Japanese Gardens and Landscapes, 1650-1950
Book
Moss, stone, trees, and sand arranged in striking or natural-looking compositions: the tradition of...
The Ince Blundell Collection of Classical Sculpture: Volume 3 : The Ideal Sculpture
Book
This book investigates the important antiquities collection formed by Henry Blundell of Ince...
Wars of the Roses: Trinity
Book
The brilliant retelling of the Wars of the Roses continues with Trinity, the second gripping...
Gustav Mahler: v.2: Wunderhorn Years - Chronicles and Commentaries
Book
A work of painstaking and imaginative scholarship presented in eminently readable language. MUSICAL...
ClareR (6067 KP) rated The Four Winds in Books
Feb 28, 2021
It’s a period of history that I know little about. I mean, I’ve watched films set in this period where people live on ramshackle farms, or in shanty-type towns, and I knew that it was something to do with the Great Depression. This book describes the side of the story of a family of farmers who lived in the Dust Bowl of Texas.
Elsa lives with her husband, children and his parents on a farm in Texas. Two children later and with the farm failing, Elsa’s husband leaves them to pursue a better life - on his own. Elsa struggles on with her in-laws and children, determined to give Loreda and Ant (her children) a home where they feel loved. But when Ant nearly dies from dust pneumonia, and the farm fails completely, they make plans to leave for California. Elsa reluctantly leaves her in-laws behind (they refuse to leave their farm), because it’s the only way to save Ant.
California isn’t the promised land of milk and honey. They arrive with little money, nowhere to stay, and Californians don’t want to help them. In fact they believe ‘Okeys’ are feckless, lazy, dirty; they refuse to house or employ them. Elsa’s only choice is to live in a tent in an encampment where poverty and typhoid are rife.
I admired Elsa’s tenacity - she works tirelessly for little money to feed her children. It’s a story of one woman’s survival and her need to protect her family.
I didn’t know anything about the Dust Bowl before I read this. I’d heard the term, but I didn’t know about the dust storms, animals dying after being filled up with dust, and people dying from dust pneumonia. This sounds like an exaggerated story, doesn’t it? But it’s not. None of this was unusual.
The Four Winds is a hard, yet compelling read. This is only the third Kristin Hannah book I’ve read, and it won’t be my last!
Many thanks to St Martin’s Press for my e-copy.


