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Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Author : Kristin Hannah
Genre : Fiction
This Dustbowl story begins in Lonesome Tree, a fictional town near Dahlhart, Texas—the town that becomes the center of the stories during the 1920s and 1930s—how the ruined land of the southern plains lost the topsoil when farmers dug up the prairie grass and replaced it with annual wheat crops.
Texas, 1921. A time of abundance. The Great War is over and the bounty of the land is plentiful. But for Elsa Wolcott, deemed too old to marry, the future seems bleak. Until the night she meets Rafe Martinelli and decides to change the direction of her life. With her reputation in ruin, 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.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 to save her young son from dust pneumonia.
Kristin Hannah writes a rich, sweeping novel that stunningly brings to life the Great Depression and the people who lived through it―the harsh realities that divided us as a nation and the enduring battle between the haves and the have-nots. A testament to hope, resilience, and the strength of the human spirit to survive adversity, This book is a complex 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.
“Heartache had been a part of her life so long it had become as familiar as the color of her hair. Sometimes it was the lens through which she viewed her world and sometimes if was the blindfold she wore so she didn’t see. But it was always there. She knew it was her own fault, somehow, her doing, even though in all her desperate musings for the foundation of it, she’d never been able to see the flaw in herself that had proven to be so defining. Everyone—including Else—had assumed she would live an apologetic life, hidden among the needs of other, more vibrant people.”
“Else climbed up into the back of the truck and took up Jack’s megaphone and faced the strikers. ‘Stop!’ she cried out. Now what? ‘Hope,’ Elsa said. “Hope is the coin I carry. An American penny, given to me by a man I cam to love. There were times in my journey, when it felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going. I came west . . . in search of a better life, but my American dreams has been turned inside out by hardship and poverty . . and greed. The land we loved turned on us, broke us all, even the stubborn old men. A man. It was always about the men. They seem to think it meant nothing to cook and clean and bear children and tend gardens. But we women of the Great Plains worked from sunup to sundown, too, toiled on wheat farms until we were as dry and baked as the land we loved. We came to find a better life, to feed our children. We aren’t lazy or shiftless. It’s time to say, no more. No more company store cheating us and keeping us poor. No more lowering wages. No more using us up and spitting us out and pitting us against each other. We deserve better. No more.”
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