The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. 

Title: The Four Winds
Author: Kristin Hannah
Release Date: 2.2.21
Publisher: St. Martin's Press


Publisher's Summary

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Great Alone comes an epic novel of love and heroism and hope, set against the backdrop of one of America’s most defining eras—the Great Depression.

Texas, 1934. Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up, and dust threatens to bury them all. One of the darkest periods of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl era, has arrived with a vengeance.

In this uncertain and dangerous time, Elsa Martinelli—like so many of her neighbors—must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or go west, to California, in search of a better life. The Four Winds is an indelible portrait of America and the American Dream, as seen through the eyes of one indomitable woman whose courage and sacrifice will come to define a generation.


My Review

I know that Kristin Hannah is a beloved author among the Bookstagram community but I tried reading The Nightingale so many times and just couldn't get into it. This put me off trying The Great Alone but I decided to give The Four Winds a shot when I saw the time period it covered. Living through The Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic causes me to more deeply reflect on previous periods of hardship, wondering how people lived day to day, especially how other mothers managed their families and households in such strained times. 

Set amidst two overlapping and devastating periods of American history, The Great Depression (August 1929 – March 1933) and The Dust Bowl (1930 - 1936), The Four Winds gave me great insight into a time period and American migrant experience (Midwest migrating to California) that I didn't know much about. Author Kristin Hannah also gave a bit of background into how these American migrants displaced Mexican migrants and expertly showed the grassroots organization of workers' rights groups. I am sure I learned about it in high school American history classes but despite being an "A" student, I don't think I retained a single fact from my history classes. However, as I get older, history becomes more relatable, tangible, and interesting. 

While reading The Four Winds I thought the eleven-day dust storms and descriptions of dust pneumonia were devastating but it was the detailed description of lack of jobs, fair wages, and adequate housing that was the most wretched. Sentences like "Not every day, but most days she worked twelve hours for fifty cents." are somehow both unsurprising and shocking. Hannah's previous novels may not have worked for me but the superb writing and storytelling in The Four Winds has made me a fan. 

Do you find that you understand history more clearly as you get older? 

Outlawed by Anna North

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Title: Outlawed
Author: Anna North 
Release Date: 1.5.2021
Publisher: Bloomsbury 

Goodreads Summary

The Crucible meets True Grit in this riveting adventure story of a fugitive girl, a mysterious gang of robbers, and their dangerous mission to transform the Wild West.

In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw.

The day of her wedding, 17 year old Ada's life looks good; she loves her husband, and she loves working as an apprentice to her mother, a respected midwife. But after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are routinely hanged as witches, her survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows.

She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, a band of outlaws led by a preacher-turned-robber known to all as the Kid. Charismatic, grandiose, and mercurial, the Kid is determined to create a safe haven for outcast women. But to make this dream a reality, the Gang hatches a treacherous plan that may get them all killed. And Ada must decide whether she's willing to risk her life for the possibility of a new kind of future for them all.

Featuring an irresistibly no-nonsense, courageous, and determined heroine, Outlawed dusts off the myth of the old West and reignites the glimmering promise of the frontier with an entirely new set of feminist stakes. Anna North has crafted a pulse-racing, page-turning saga about the search for hope in the wake of death, and for truth in a climate of small-mindedness and fear.

My Review:

When I first saw Outlawed pop up on my radar in April 2020 I had just recently read Upright Women Wanted and I loved the idea of another queer Western novel. Where Upright Women Wanted is a near-future dystopia, Outlawed takes place in an alternate, late 19th century United States where a quasi-Christian religion values reproduction above all else. 

"We had read Burton's Lessons of the Infant Jesus Christ every year since third form, so we had heard about how God sent the Great Flu to cleanse the world of evil, just like he'd sent the flood so many centuries before. We knew that baby Jesus had appeared to Mary of Texarkana after the sickness had killed nine of every ten men, women, and children from Boston to California, and struck a covenant with her: if those who remained were fruitful and peopled the world in His image, He would spare them further sickness, and they and their descendants forever after would be precious to Him."

Just as in our real world, the world of Outlawed is peopled with those who are not cis, heterosexual, and/or fertile, but if a person doesn't fall into these expected categories they are run out of town, hanged, and/or violently assaulted. Main protagonist, eighteen-year-old Ada has been accused of witchcraft due to her failure to become pregnant and accusations from the community are leading to whispers of her hanging. Sent out of town to a convent Ada begins to research the true reason behind barrenness (medical not religious *gasp*) and then risks a journey beyond the convent to seek out rare medical texts. When she comes upon the camp of The Hole in the Wall Gang, she realizes there is something different about these outlaws. 

I loved that this novel integrated themes of mental and physical health, intersectional feminism, and opposition to patriarchal expectations but I did have a few problems with not mixing up the characters. I think this is due to the author's intention of showing how each character initially confuses Ada with their sexuality and demeanor. I also think that too many characters are introduced at a single time (when Ada meets The Whole in the Wall Gang) but they are not given enough descriptors to firmly establish each character in readers' minds. My advice is to take a few notes about the characters as you read.