#the four wjnds

[proseandpinotnoir]

THE FOUR WINDS by Kristin Hannah

4.5/5 🌾☔️🌪🙏🏻

The Four Winds is a difficult book to summarize because I felt as though it transformed into something it didn’t necessarily have the skeleton for at its outset. What I thought were the bones of an extremely character-driven story about hardship and love and loss during the Dust Bowl Era actually morphed into something with wings: a much more expansive and sweeping arc about the essence of the American dream and its intersectionality with classism and political ideology.

I struggled to find a thread of continuity connecting what I consider to be two disparate halves of a whole, but have come to the conclusion that the driving force of The Four Winds is as stark as it is simple: roots. Literal and metaphorical roots, and the parallels between them.

During the Dust Bowl, the overplowed topsoil of the Southern Plains region became so powdery and exposed that nothing - neither crops nor vegetables nor simple garden flowers - could take root. The land became harsher and more unforgiving with each passing year. Birds fell from the sky and butchered cow carcasses yielded dust instead of meat.

There were no roots so to speak of, save for metaphorical ones. Elsa Martinelli and her in-laws had driven roots of their own, comprised of hard work and love and grit and resolve, deep into the same soil that refused to show their wheat crops even the slightest mercy. And because the Martinellis believed in their roots and their land and their God and the American dream, they refused to leave. Until it became clear that to stay was to die. And then: is this - betrayal? forsakening? - reconciled with anger, or through faith?

Choosing faith and hope, Elsa uproots herself and her children and heads west to California, where the reader has the distinct displeasure of bearing witness to the myriad of ways in which the American dream can play out over a variety of multifaceted landscapes. The roots of the dream, while conceptually pure, yield different outcomes depending on circumstance and irrespective of hard work.

In the case of Rosa and Tony, there is no such thing as equal opportunity because there’s literally no opportunity. The dust storms do not care you are or where you come from or how hard you’ve worked: they bury everyone the same.

In the case of Elsa, there is opportunity, but it isn’t equal. No matter how hard she works, the only opportunity available to her is entrenched in an oppressive and discriminatory system that would destroy her before lets her succeed.

This book is a study in endurance. A testament to the idea that sometimes, to uproot is to endure. I was left with the lingering impression that the roots that matter most are not the ones we anchor in places or ideas, but the ones we share with those we love. This is how we forge systems stronger than the ones we can’t control: by watering the permanent roots that link mother and daughter. Families and friends.

I was deeply affected by this book (as you can see) & highly recommend it.

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