UTOPIA PR | Kirkus Opinions

The miseries of the Melancholy and Mud Bowl years form the future of a Texas household.

“Hope is a coin I carry: an American penny, given to me by a person I got here to like. There have been occasions in my journey once I felt as if that penny and the hope it represented have been the one issues that stored me going.” We meet Elsa Wolcott in Dalhart, Texas, in 1921, on the eve of her twenty fifth birthday, and wind up together with her in California in 1936 in a saga of just about unrelieved woe. Despised by her shallow dad and mom and sisters for being sickly and unattractive—“too tall, too skinny, too pale, too not sure of herself”—Elsa escapes their cruelty when a single evening of abandon results in being pregnant and compelled marriage to the son of Italian immigrant farmers. Although she finds some pleasure working the land, tending the animals, and studying her manner round Mama Rose’s kitchen, her marriage is rarely completely satisfied, the pleasures of early motherhood are temporary, and shortly the disastrous droughts of the Nineteen Thirties drive all of the farmers of the world to despair and hunger. Elsa’s seek for a greater life for her kids takes them out west to California, the place issues change into even worse. Whereas she by no means overcomes her low vanity about her seems to be, Elsa shows an iron core of character and braveness as she faces mud storms, floods, starvation riots, homelessness, poverty, the distress of migrant labor, bigotry, union busting, violent goons, and extra. The pedantic goals of the novel are exhausting to disregard as Hannah embodies her historical past lesson in what seems like a sequence of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd feelings.

For devoted Hannah followers in quest of an excellent cry.