The coronavirus pandemic is a relentless presence in the world. In less than a year, it has drastically changed our lives.
Schools, movie theaters and restaurants are closed. We stay home. Family gatherings and travel plans? Canceled. Millions of jobs and hundreds of thousands of lives are lost. The economy is at its worst in decades.
Hold on: Kristin Hannah has a hopeful message for us. It is embedded in her new novel, “The Four Winds.” The story is set in the early 1930s during the Great Depression, when an extended drought led to horrific dust storms that plagued the prairies in several southcentral states, including Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle. Farmers were forced to abandon their homes and search for a better life elsewhere. A half million of them settled in California, where they encountered discrimination and poverty.
Did they despair? You bet. And yet, people rose to the challenge and persevered.
“When I started writing this almost four years ago, I had no idea how relevant it would be to today, with a pandemic and the worst economic downturn in decades,” Hannah said. “’The Four Winds’ is a story of survival. It is the kind of book people need to read right now.
“America has had hard times before,” she said. “We survived, we got through it all. There are good times ahead.”
Hannah will be featured in a Zoom-based virtual book tour event hosted by Warwick’s bookstore at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 3. Tickets for “A Conversation with Kristin Hannah and Harlan Coben” include signed copies of “The Four Winds.” The books can be shipped or picked up at the La Jolla store.
Previously scheduled personal appearances have moved online, following COVID-19 safety protocols, so Hannah will dial in to the Zoom call from her Pacific Northwest home. Coben, a prolific writer of thrillers, lives in New Jersey.
“I miss not being at the bookstore in person,” Hannah said. “I love Warwick’s. I love San Diego and La Jolla, that whole area. But I am really looking forward to talking to Harlan. He is so talented and very funny. He’s just such a doll.”
The Warwick’s event is on the same day that a limited TV series based on Hannah’s 2013 novel, “Firefly Lane,” will be available for streaming on Netflix. “Firefly Lane” traces the relationship between two best friends over 30 years. Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke star.
The new book and the TV series happening at the same time is a little overwhelming for Hannah, who confesses she is not working on another book at the moment, perhaps a first for her. The former attorney started writing historical romance novels after her son was born. He is now grown with a family of his own. She still writes.
After 20 novels in the man-woman genre, Hannah started exploring the conflicts and connections of other types of relationships: parent-child, siblings and best friends. Her primary characters are women in difficult circumstances who must learn to be strong enough to survive. In her 2015 novel “Nightingale,” two sisters struggle during the German occupation of their native France during World War II. It is an epic international best seller and a film based on the book has a scheduled release in December. It stars Dakota and Elle Fanning.
The worldwide response to “Nightingale” amazed her.
“When I saw how deeply it affected people, I decided to do an American story that featured powerful females, front and center,” Hannah said. “Stories about heroism have always been male-dominated. History has ignored the stories about how powerful women have been and can be.”
Elsa, the protagonist in “The Four Winds,” is a young woman in Dalhart, Texas, who is largely ignored by her parents and her sisters because they think she is not pretty enough to attract a husband.
A youthful misstep catapults her into a Sicilian family of wheat farmers in a lonely settlement outside of town. She is forced to marry the farmer’s teenaged son, and despite the relatively loveless union, she gives birth to a girl and a boy. It takes time and a lot of hard work, but eventually Elsa feels at home. The farm yields a modest living during the Great Depression.
But, naturally, the good times do not last. Crops decline during the drought. There is little food, no money, and a threat of foreclosure on the land. The father of Elsa’s children leaves the farm to escape the misery. Then the relentless dust storms begin. Elsa packs her children into a truck and heads for California.
Hannah spent almost two years researching the Dust Bowl era to learn about everything that happened and how people lived through it.
“I didn’t know about the level of hardship people faced,” she said. “I was surprised by how deep and dark their days were. It is an important bit of American history that has been forgotten.”
Memoirs gave her telling details, which she uses in stark descriptions to pack an emotional punch.
“My job is to take it all and distill it down into images and moments, so the reader experiences what it was like, instead of just reading about it, “ Hannah said.
“I want to entertain, educate and make the readers feel deeply enough so that they ask themselves, ‘what would I do if I were in that situation?’”
“The Four Winds” by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s Press, 2021; 464 pages)
Kristin Hannah at Warwick’s
What: In conversation with Harlan Coben
When: 6 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Virtual event hosted by Warwick’s
Tickets: $28.99-$31.99
Phone: (858) 454-0347
Online: warwicks.com/event/hannah-2021
Gaugh is a freelance writer.
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