Reviews with content warning for Police brutality - Os Quatro Ventos

4.5 ⭐s. I'm dead I died I'm deceased. People were like oh yeah I cried so hard at that book and I was like YeAh BuT nOt Me. WRONG-O! I see why this won BOTM's Best Book of 2021 cuz it has mass appeal for days. Excuse me while I NEVER GET OVER THE ENDING. Thanks.

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carissa230's review against another edition

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emotional sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

At this point I would probably read a menu if Kristin Hannah wrote it.

The Great Depression and Dust Bowl was a hard time for the United States. The Four Winds is a look at what it was like for one family to survive.

Elsa had a rough childhood, never felt like she fit with her family, and was always looking for her place in the world. One night she meets a young man and they procreate. As soon as her parents find out they dump her at his parents house and pretty much never speak to her again.

Elsa finds her place in the world among this new family and is thriving helping run the farm. When the Dust Bowl hits Texas they are hit hard. Elsa has to decide what is the best thing to save her family. When she decides to take her children and move to CA she thinks this is the beginning of a new life for them. Little did she know that they would be treated like pariahs.

As the families in CA grow more and more desperate to survive, the ones that have are getting more aggressive with the have nots.

It is sad to see how in some ways history is repeating itself with people blaming immigrants for their problems.

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theoverbookedshelf's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful inspiring medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.25

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linesiunderline's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

There’s something about a new Kristin Hannah title that always calls to me. Maybe it’s the promise of a long story to really get lost in, or the idea that maybe this will be the book that will make me get what all the fuss is about. I’ve read 3 of hers now - The Nightingale, The Great Alone, and this one, and I’d say of the three, this one falls in the middle in terms of my ranking. For reference, The Nightingale was still in the 3⭐️ range for me, and The Great Alone left me with very mixed feels.

Here’s what I appreciated about The Four Winds:
- Excellent sense of place: Hannah is very good at this. In my opinion, the sense of place was one of the redeeming aspects of The Great Alone. Here, you can see / smell / taste / hear / feel what it might have been like to live through the Dust Bowl.
- The relationship between Elsa and her daughter felt true and complex and I thought it evolved in a believable way.
- The pacing at the start made it hard to put down and drew me in immediately, which is one of my fave reading feelings.

Not so much:
- Tragedy upon tragedy upon tragedy (which I’m sure is pretty realistic given the historical period), but that’s what put me off with The Great Alone so it felt a little deja vu to me.
- At times it was super melodramatic and overwritten in the emotional department.

Will I keep reading Kristin Hannah? Probably. Her books are right for a certain reading mood, and that’s enough for me.

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marlenealina's review against another edition

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emotional sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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