I was told I would ugly cry, and I did. Told in her beautiful writing style, Kristin Hannah took me on a journey of life during the Great Depression, in the Dust Bowl, and in the shoes of the migrants from all over America. I felt I was with them in the mud, sickness and poverty that California held for them, in tent cities, picking cotton to feed their families. It was strangely related to what many are living through today.

Once again the heroine is a woman who doesn't beleive in herself, because she was taught not too. And once again we fall in love with a warrior who finds her power and strength, surrounded by love.

Beautiful.

Very enjoyable reading. I've read Hannah's European books. This time she explore America during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. It's sad to see so many parallels to today. Elsa Martinelli is a strong woman raising strong children in extremely tough times.

The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah. An interesting read that details the hardships of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression and the plights faced by the farm workers in California and farmers in Texas during that time. Elsa is a remarkable woman and an inspiration. Heartbreaking, depressing to read but the love of family and perseverance shines throughout. Wish the story hadn't ended so abruptly, felt there was more to Loreda's and Ant's story.

Thank you to the publisher, author, and NetGalley for the opportunity to preview the book.

I loved Kristin Hannah's books. When I read one of her books it's like a friend is sitting on my sofa and says, "Let me tell you a great story." Another wonderful book.
The Four Winds is rich in American history. The story starts during the Roaring Twenties. When the economy was booming. Farmers had wheat in the fields. Women cut their hair and won the right to vote. A decade later came drought, The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Families lost everything. For many the only choice they had was to move west to California. The land of milk and honey. What they faced was discrimination and terrible working conditions. They languished in poverty.
The bigger story is the main character, Elsa Martinelli. She is a dauntless character. Faced with so much in her life she is courage, strong and determined, no matter what is throw at her. You can not help but cheer her on.
But mainly the story is about the family, love, survival and home.
Thank you NetGalley, St. Martin Publication and author Kristin Hannah the opportunity to read and give and honest review.

The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah
Book starts out with a listing of the author's other works, dedication and prologue where we learn about the penny that has hope for one's new life in US.
1921 and we start out in TX and Elsa has been raised to be very poor in health so the parents keep her safe at home.
Her sisters are beautiful and are married and out in the world. Elsa wants to be more like them so she does a few things to her hair and dress and spends the night at a speakeasy where she meets a boy.
She meets him more over time and before you know it she's with child. What I hated to read was that her father dropped her off at the boys house for them to take care of the daughter and child.
She was from a very well to do banker family and knows nothing of preparing meals and doing chores. She is thankful to learn how to do everything.
Rafe is tired of TX life and the droughts cause him to just up and leave to head to CA. They don't hear from him and the youngest boy needs to be relocated for his health so she packs up the kids and heads west also, leaving the grandparents behind.
Terrifying hearing of the nights spent on the road and passing through the desert. When they reach CA things are not what they expected and Elsa is NOT afraid to work. She meets a wonderful woman in camp who gives her information about how to survive.
She did scrub a woman's house from top to bottom til 6pm one day and got 40 cents. She puts the kids in school and while searching for work she tries to also find Rafe.
Fell in love with this side of CA during the depression reading about it from John Steinbecks stories so to me this is an added plus to continue on with the story coming from a different irrespective.
Hard times hits them front and center and just when you think they are getting ahead you realize they are not. They realize it also and the daughter goes to do something about it.
So many emotions and I love hearing of the travels and the places they went through on their way to follow their dreams.
Tragic times and love hearing about how they survived through it all. Love hearing of the strikes during the time as the land owners were in control and could set the price of a picker for the day...
Never saw the ending happening as it did but was so glad Ledora gets to bring it all full circle and move on with her life as she gets older.
Received this review copy from St. Martin's Press via publicist via NetGalley and this is my honest opinion.
#TheFourWinds #NetGalley

Thank you Netgalley for this ARC from one of my favorite authors.

As always, the story is beautifully written and I was quickly sucked in. The characters are complex, and it feels at times like the hardships they endure are never ending. This is an emotionally heavy story, and feels very real. I have a feeling these characters and events will stay with me for a long time

I received an ARC digital copy of Kristin Hannah’s The Four Winds directly from St. Martin’s Press and am delighted to offer my unbiased review. My thanks to Erica Martirano and DJ DeSmyter of St. Martins Press, NetGalley, and to Kristin Hannah.

Having read The Nightingale and The Great Alone, I was familiar with Ms. Hannah’s ability to portray strong female characters. She writes with fastidious attention to detail; she does her research well. In several reviews, I have seen comparisons, even as criticism, that this book is much like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. It has been far too many years since I’ve read that epic Pulitzer Prize winning novel so I can’t do a detailed comparison. However, Hannah’s story, like Steinbeck’s, chronicles a family’s struggles during the Dust Bowl and Depression. Both reveal the search for a better life and also the fight for unions, better work conditions, and higher pay.

Elsinore “Elsa” Martinelli shows us what true grit really is. She is the product of a family that does not really love her or accept her for who she is, nor do they accept others whom they consider to be beneath them. When Elsa becomes pregnant unexpectedly, she is forced to marry a man many years her junior. While she grows to love him, times are tough. With the love and support of her in-laws, Rose and Tony, Elsa evolves from a frail, book-loving town girl to a hard-working, competent mother and farm wife. Yet she never considers herself strong or brave. When the tough conversations need to happen, she tends fall back on her old habits by withdrawing into herself.

I didn’t love Elsa at first. It took a while for her to grow on me. But grow on me she did. The Four Winds is a story that requires patience because reading about the day in, day out hardships of what was to be called “the Dust Bowl” is painful. There are days and weeks and months without rain. Supplies are dwindling. Friends, neighbors, and families are packing up and leaving for “the land of milk and honey” – California.

Rafe is restless. And he fills their daughter Loreda’s head with dreams, too. This causes friction in the family, but as always, Rose is her pillar of strength and wisdom. My heart broke for this family, and I couldn’t help pulling for them. So much of what happens is predictable, although some of it is not. Some of the events are remarkably good; others are terribly depressing. All of it seems realistic, especially the descriptions of life on the farm in the encampment. Then there is the discrimination, the hatred, the back-breaking work the migrants did for hours for so little pay. The characters felt like real people to me. If I have one complaint, it is that the ending happens so quickly.

Despite the despair and hardship, there is also hope. There is hope that Loreda and little brother Anthony – called Ant (love that!) will go to college and have a bright future. There is love, so much love, despite the fights and the struggles. As Elsa tells Loreda, “It’s durable. It lasts.”

4.5 rounded to 5 stars

So let me get this straight. A book that supports and pushes COMMUNISM as the answer to struggles in America? What the heck is the world coming to when authors write things like this? Was it a good story? Yes. Well written? Yes. But the hidden agenda and blatant glorification of communism is a huge problem for me. I won’t be reading any more from this author. If you don’t like this country and our form of government, it’s time for you to move. Go live in a communist country and come back and tell me how great it is. Go for it.

BRAVO to the author, this is her best work yet. This was so thoroughly researched and well written I LOVED it. IT showed the strength, the bravery, the hesitancy, the will of the people during the Great Depression. It was so moving, so vivid, I could feel the dust in my teeth, the coughing from the dust, and the insects coming out of hiding.
I loved the characters. Especially the relationship between Rosa and Elsa. I can't stress enough how timely this book is and how thought provoking it truly is.
Everyone should read this book. This is the new American classic.

THank you to Netgalley, the Publisher, and the author for letting me read this extraordinary book.

Thank you Netgalley, St. Martin's Press and Kristin Hannah for an early ready copy!

I absolutely loved this book! I didn't know much about it when I started it, as I will read anything by Kristin Hannah, but this book is exceptional.

Elsa Martinelli is a young woman whose life has been defined by her parents; after a childhood illness, she is considered not strong, not healthy, not pretty and a lifelong spinster. A chance meeting with a young man changes her life in a most unexpected way. As she leaves her parents to become part of another family, she learns what family can and should be, and just how strong and capable she is. But after years of living on a farm, in the midst of the Great Depression when things can't get any worse, they do. The winds scour Texas as they do the Great Plains, killing crops, drying up water, and leaving people with nothing to eat and nowhere to go. Like many others Elsa heads west to start a new life, but this time with her two children.

In California, Else learns that things are not as they have been advertised. Caught up in the endless cycle of abusive employers, lack of money, hatred and discrimination by the locals, like many newcomers Elsa feels trapped. But an unexpected encounter leads her to recognize the internal strength she has always had and helps her to become the leader she has always been inside.

The Four Winds is tells story of the migrants from the Midwest in the story of Elsa. This is historical fiction at it's best: compelling, compassionate, enraging and courageous. I will definitely read this book again!

Kristin Hannah writes such gripping and captivating stories and this one is no different. The Four Winds follows Elsa Martinelli and her family as they live during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl in Texas. Elsa, the main character, was someone you were rooting for during the entire book. You wanted her to realize her courageous spirit that was simmering below the surface. You wanted her to find her happiness. And as a mother, you felt her struggle to hold it all together in a time when everything was falling apart. This book was a journey in her self-realization.

Kristin Hannah wrote an amazing group of characters and really embodied what the world was like during this time in our history. You felt all the emotions the characters were feeling. You felt the desperation and the determination. The story is heartbreaking and inspiring. This book is a great read with all the feels. If you have liked any of Kristin Hannah’s other books, you will love this one.

464 pages

5 stars

Elsa is a unique character. She is the product of a racist and unbending family and the trauma of her childhood gave Elsa a skewed sense of what love is. Told she was unattractive and too tall, too thin, etc she had very low self-esteem and expectations looking forward. Thinking she was unloveable, she had no expectations and only knew hard work. Steely determination carried her through the hardships. She hardly thought of herself as courageous, but she was.

She falls wildly in “love” with a younger man (I put that in quotes, because she doesn't know what love really is until later in her life.) For her trouble, she is shunned and driven out of the family.

She, however, finds a true family in her husband Rafe's mother and father Rosa and Tony. They live on a huge farm in Texas and mainly grow wheat. The land is everything to them and it becomes so for Elsa. Rafe doesn't agree. He is a dreamer and he teaches their daughter to dream as well. This causes problems with Elsa and she becomes a teenager.

The draught begins. For several years there is very little or no rain. The crops die, the dirt blows ceaselessly. The animals die, the land dies. Hope is lost. People begin to move West.

Elsa and her children join the trek to California but it is not the paradise they expected. They find homelessness and hardship. Living in a tent city, begging for scraps, they inhabitants treat them badly. They can't even get help at a hospital in times of emergency.

This book is remarkably well written and plotted. The characters are very real. I can see the conditions for myself as Ms. Hannah's descriptions are so vivid and colorful. Elsa was difficult to like in some ways. I felt compassion at her upbringing and extreme anger at her birth family. What horrible people! But she was fiercely loyal. For someone who never finished high school, she was very intelligent and determined to do right by her children. I decided in the end that I liked her.

I want to thank NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for forwarding to me a copy of this wonderful book for me to read, enjoy and review.

Full review online in February.

THE FOUR WINDS is a good read, but definitely not a light read. Set in the dust bowl and the Great Depression, it is very sad; and the feeling of sadness and hopelessness never left me as I kept reading. The writing is absolutely beautiful, with parts of the book bringing me to tears. Some of it reminded me of what we are experiencing in today’s world. Yet the indomitable spirits of Elsa Martinelli and her daughter Loreda were what drove the story forward, along with the love of their extended family.

This is a must read for all lovers of historical fiction and especially Kristin Hannah fans,