Review: The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah
Photo by Mary Hammel on Unsplash
Synopsis:
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 was 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 ruins, 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.
This was the bleakest book I’ve ever read.
I’ve read two of Kristin Hannah’s books: The Great Alone and The Nightingale, and I enjoyed both of them. Sure, they were heart-wrenching, and I cried my eyes out when I finished, but the characters were compelling and realistic, and I was immediately drawn into the story. I picked up this book expecting more of the same.
Sadly, The Four Winds seemed less like a character-driven story about one woman’s indomitable will to survive, and more like a bloated, emotionally-manipulative piece of trauma porn masquerading as a sweeping epic.
It’s obvious that Hannah did an impressive amount of research into the time period and the experiences of migrant workers (albeit white migrant workers, but more on that later). But instead of creating a cohesive narrative about the struggles of the many, it coalesces into a bland narrative that reduces all the characters into simplistic tropes.
The protagonist, Elsa Wolcott, has all the personality of a teaspoon. This is a woman who spent years internalizing everything her hateful parents could throw at her; who kept waiting for her dumbass husband to finally realize how much she loved him, and who endures immeasurable cruelty from her insufferable daughter. Yet she never says a single word in her own defense. (This is all in just the first hundred pages of the book, by the way) I don’t know anybody who has this much patience. Except for maybe Jesus, and even he flipped some tables when he was mad.
So many bad things happened to Elsa, that about halfway through the book, I was utterly desensitized; I could not have cared less. Oh, another dust storm you say? That’s a shame. Whoops, they ran out of gas in the middle of the desert? Better luck next time, babe.
Looking through some of the reviews on Goodreads, a number of people said they felt like Hannah just researched every bad thing that could have ever happened to migrant workers, and then forced all of it upon her main character. I wholeheartedly agree. Nothing good happened to anyone, ever. I know this is set during the Great Depression, but it just seemed like Hannah was angling to make her readers cry at every opportunity. I don’t appreciate an author using trauma in order to elicit an emotional reaction, especially when it comes at the expense of creating a meaningful story.
Additionally, the pacing was all over the place. There were times when Hannah just rushed over things—dust storms, floods, and endless days of driving in the desert flew by in a few paragraphs. And then the story would shudder to a stop, and move at an utterly glacial pace for a few hundred pages. I understand the author was probably trying to mimic the unpredictability of nature and then juxtapose it with the drudgery of life in a migrant camp, but it just didn’t add up to a compelling read. Especially in a book that clocks in around 450 pages. It was just a slog getting through it.
But my biggest problem by far, was the complete erasure of people of color. California was and is an incredibly diverse state, and the fact that there isn’t so much as one character of color didn’t sit well with me at all.
Hannah briefly mentions the massive forced deportation of Mexican laborers, but her explanations make it seem as if this got rid of the whole population, which is laughably inaccurate. Yes, white migrant workers who came to California experienced horrible prejudice and horrific living conditions, but Hannah seems content to forget about the struggles of Mexican, Filipino, Black, Native American and Asian farm laborers who were already working in the state. For every nasty sentence Elsa endured, for every squalid labor camp she took shelter in, for every measly day’s wages she managed to rake in, minority workers experienced the same thing, with a side of racism thrown in. (And not to play the who suffered more game, but they absolutely had it worse)
A big part of the story is the Communist party trying to convince the migrant workers to strike and advocate for better pay; Elsa and her daughter eventually fall in with the group and even lead labor strikes. But again, Hannah fails to mention that people of color were a huge part of the growing labor movement. The first successful agricultural strike in the US was because Mexican and Japanese farm laborers banded together to fight back against their exploitation. This happened in 1903, well before Elsa and her family made it to California. Dolores Huerta and César Chávez didn’t pop out of nowhere; they both grew up during the Depression when their families migrated to California to find work on farms.
This book was just hugely misrepresentative. Not only that, as a Mexican woman, it just plain hurt to see how Hannah completely excluded us from a time period we were very much a part of.
It’s 2021, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for a historical novel that doesn’t whitewash history. We already have The Grapes of Wrath.
Content Warning: Prejudice, poverty, suffering, starvation, death of animals, violence, murder.