What a gift this woman has for writing and how prolific. She is not bound by any particular geographical setting, or historical time frame, somehow able to make a memorable and gripping story out of anything. Maybe her next novel will be set in space! At the core of her novels are one or two strong, determined, intelligent and resourceful female characters, faced with circumstances that require them to dig very deep to overcome. This novel was finished during the first half of 2020, many people having enormous challenges to overcome. Reading this, or any Kristin Hannah novel, will, I am sure and hope, be hugely relatable to readers.
Elsa lives with her parents in a small town in Texas. It is early 1930s. Elsa is the ugly duckling in her family and treated as such. Despite being intelligent and self aware, she sees little future for herself in this town, dreaming of being able to leave and make something of herself. But she has spirit, and in a rare show of defiance she meets a local boy, the inevitable happens, and before she knows it she is Elsa Martinelli, banished by her family, and now living on a farm with her in laws. Not a good start you might think and what else can go wrong. Drought is what goes wrong, then the Great Depression. There is plenty of information on line about this time in US history, the dust storms, the havoc wrecked on the rural economies, the lack of help from federal agencies, and the mass migrations from these devastated and destroyed rural areas westwards to California. Life is no picnic when these refugees finally make it to the promised land with nowhere to live, no jobs, enormous prejudice, predatory employers - the complete powerlessness and hopelessness that these hardworking people find themselves in.
Elsa makes the monumental decision to follow others to California, taking her children, leaving her in-laws. The journey itself is hazardous, but nothing compared to what awaits them when they finally arrive in California. Elsa is an amazing woman, the safety and future of her children her driving force in all decisions and actions she takes. That defiance and burst of character in her teens explodes out of her as she tries to make a better life for her small family.
This is gripping stuff, not only for the story line, but also for the author's vividness of writing - the lives of the farmers, how the dust storms and drought devastate the farms and crops, how starvation affects the body and the mind. And yet that instinct for survival just keeps on driving. Her imagery of the camps that the migrants find themselves living in, the pathetic and hopeless search for jobs, food, medical care. The lack of kindness, care and humanity from the people of California to their fellow Americans is pretty appalling. Many parallels are drawn between what happened then and what has been happening in the US over the last few years, the author alluding to this in her comments at the end. A very powerful and engrossing novel.
No comments:
Post a Comment