Reviews with content warning for Child death - The Four Winds

Reviews tagging 'Child death'

The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

118 reviews

astoriareader's review

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challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced

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

5.0

SYNOPSIS:

It is the 1920s in a small farming community in the Texas Panhandle. Elsa Martinelli grew up in a wealthy family, who never appreciated her & make her feel hard to love. At age 25, she hooks up with Rafe, and she winds up pregnant. They get married, and she moves in with Rafe and his parents, Rosa and Tony, on their farm.
Fast forward, it is 1930s. Along the stock market crash & The Great Depression, there are also several years of drought and The Dust Bowl. Elsa has two kids now, Ant & Lareda, and with no end in sight to the dust storms, Elsa abandon their home and flee to California where they hope work and a better life await. The book details what happens when the family arrives in California.

MY THOUGHTS

As my first read of 2024, I wanted to start off with a book by one of my favorite authors. This marks the fourth book I’ve read by Hannah, with the others being: The Great Alone, The Women, The Nightingale.
Hannah is an expert at character development & writing strong female characters. I always learn something when reading her historical fictions. In this one, I learned a lot that I didn’t know about the Dust Bowl & migrants.
I thoroughly enjoyed the bonds that develop among the characters in the book, and the imagery and vivid descriptions of the surroundings were also very well done.
It is definitely a sweeping story, and it is a hard one to read.
My only complaint about the book is all the characters were white, and I would have enjoyed different perspectives about the experiences of BIPOC folks.
Kudos to Hannah for clearly spending a lot of time researching the era & the topics covered in the book.

TL;DR: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️historical fiction with strong women as main characters. time period: Dust Bowl.

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sarahfeller's review

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emotional hopeful informative reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Content Warnings

faduma's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional inspiring reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

crabbytaco's review

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adventurous emotional informative slow-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

3.75

Content Warnings

sophs_mood_reading's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful reflective sad tense medium-paced

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

5.0

I always knew from the name of the period that the Great Depression was a very hard time but wow this book took on that and tripled it.

Elsa Martinelli life had never been one of joy but when the 30’s hit her life on the dust bowl turn devastating. The farm is failing, her husband is a drunk and the land is killing the crops, animals and her children. She must make a decision to attempt to save them.

This novel depicts the physical, mental and emotional struggle of one family in the depression. Told in a duel point of view of mother and daughter it is a beautiful tale of heartache, determination and fear.

The imagery makes you taste and feel the dry heat and dust. You really are transported to the time.

It also highlights how easily human nature can attack an outsider or newcomer and how easy people can take on the “Us and Them” mentality to justify cruelty and injustice.

Warning I did tear up a couple of times so be aware if reading in public.

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passionatereader78's review

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adventurous challenging emotional sad slow-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

4.5

This is an emotional story. A historical fiction. It's about a challenging lifestyle during a horrible time in history. Elsa is a frail woman or at least thats what her parents have beaten into her. She will never marry, have children, or have a job. At age twenty-five, Elsa starts to rebel against what she's been told. She meets Rafe and gets pregnant. They get married and live with his family on their farm. Elsa's happiness is short lived. When the dust storms take over Texas, Elsa has to decide how to save her family. Do they stay in Texas and fight for their land or do they head to California (The land of milk and honey)not knowing what waits for them? The relationship between Elsa and Loreda(Elsa's daughter)is one filled with turmoil. They love each other and want what's best for their family. They both have different ideas of how to get it. I enjoyed the writing on both sides of their relationship. I thought Elsa was doing what she thought was best from her past experiences and Lareda is young and full of life. She's ready to fight injustice not realizing what she will have to sacrifice to get what she wants. Laredo is whiny at times and I would have liked about fifty to a hundred pages less. I don't think we needed everything that was written.

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taylorjones118's review

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challenging dark emotional informative inspiring sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

Content Warnings

bookedbymadeline's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional sad medium-paced

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

3.0

This is my second book from Hannah, technically, but the first one that I finished! It had a slow start but around the 60 page mark I got more into the story. It’s an emotional story with a lot of trauma these characters are put through.

Hannah does a good job of describing the atmosphere of the time period, for the most part. The novel taught me more about the Dust Bowl than I ever learned at school! We were taught about the dust storms and how it made living in the region dangerous, but I never learned just how intertwined the Dust Bowl and Great Depression were. It was eye-opening and I want to read more about the subject, especially since this is only the beginning and a lot was left out.

We read the novel through the perspectives of Elsa and her daughter Loreda. I really enjoyed the switching perspectives but they often felt repetitive and didn’t add many new things in each chapter. I didn’t love the characters, they felt a bit flat. I would’ve liked more character development especially from Loreda who blames her mom for literally everything. Elsa I liked a tiny bit more because for me, I read the repetition of her character as just trying to survive day to day for her kids and not having room to do/think about much else.

Themes of the book still felt very relevant to issues we still face today like the treatment of migrant workers and how many people are “othered”, the fight for worker’s rights, the lack of social support, and environmental disasters.

I think another reviewer mentioned the unfortunate lack of historical accuracy surrounding the striking/workers rights events as Hannah created a fictional event to center “Okies” (white migrant farmers) when a very real event took place around the same time involving Mexican migrant workers. The lack of diversity was disappointing, especially as Mexican and Black migrant workers were also central to this time period. It also became an issue as it was very white washed, I understand it’s historical fiction and you can’t fit everything into one book-but at 450 pages and repetitive dialogue, you could at least acknowledge certain aspects.

The talk about the Martinelli’s land (and Texas in general) is talked about in a “manifest destiny” sort of way. Elsa’s grandfather “fought to get this land”…failing to mention the Native Americans it was taken from. In fact, there is never any mention of them, the land just appeared magically apparently. The erasure of certain parts of history and minority groups, in favor of centering on white migrants (while conveniently ignoring their own white privilege) is at best irresponsible and at worst dangerous. Hannah chose to focus on an ugly part of history while conveniently taking out the marginalized communities mainly affected.

And the constant repetitiveness of “bad thing bad thing, but this is America” “ooh bad things are happening. In America” “this isn’t who we are in America.” YES IT IS! The constant pushing of this narrative when it is America and always has been, just not for middle class white people up until the Great Depression, was frustrating and inaccurate. It’s a real white woman moment for Hannah to have her characters constantly saying these things, ignoring history, and comparing themselves to slaves?! You may be getting paid an unlivable wage BUT YOU ARE GETTING PAID AND CAN LEAVE 😬

I was loving this book and feeling like it would be at least 4 stars, right up until this slave comparison/“oh my god how can this happen in America” nonsense. As if America is the pinnacle of freedom and there’s no way anyone could be so mistreated (except for the Native Americans, Black people, Jewish people, poor people, Mexican migrant workers, immigrants, etc etc) 🙃

Bare minimum was for Hannah to have addressed this history that she omitted in her afterword and explain why she did not include it, but instead she used that space to glorify and praise the white pioneers who reaped the benefits of the genocide.

Overall it was an interesting story that held my attention and taught me that I should look at the subject further. But the repetitive writing, lack of character development, and historical erasure was a bit disappointing. I’ll give Hannah’s books one more chance as I enjoyed this one well enough and DNFd one other, (plus I already have two more of her books on my shelves) so maybe lucky number 3 will be better!

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abbasaurusrex's review

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dark emotional sad tense slow-paced

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

2.5

This was my first Kristin Hannah. I saw someone describe the author’s books as the Hallmark movies of historical fiction and now, having finished this, I can confirm that is accurate. Equal parts trauma porn and pearl clutching, this book just did not strike the right chords for me. I appreciated the view into a particular place and time in history that I knew little about, but found it a bit overdone, as it seems like the author is trying to address every single hardship of the Dust Bowl farmers/migrant workers through a single family’s experience. By the end of the book I almost felt sorry for the characters, not as victims of history, but as victims of the author. I just don’t enjoy watching people get dumped on, no matter how “historically accurate” the author might claim the events to be. The character development also didn’t hit. I found all of the characters to be a bit one-note and inconsistent, and their “development” (if you can call it that) seemed forced and incomplete. It’s almost like the author said, “I wanna write about the Dust Bowl,” instead of saying “here are some themes I want to explore, and I think the Dust Bowl and this particular family is the appropriate context in which to examine those themes.” She somehow manages to do too much and too little at the same time. Finally, there is not a single person of color in the narrative. I would have appreciated a more diverse perspective for a book that tries to tackle such a massive part of US history.

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samikatee's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad tense slow-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? It's complicated

5.0

Content Warnings

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