THE DUKE UNDONE | Kirkus Critiques

The miseries of the Despair 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 saved 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 uncertain 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 means round Mama Rose’s kitchen, her marriage is rarely comfortable, the pleasures of early motherhood are temporary, and shortly the disastrous droughts of the Thirties drive all of the farmers of the realm to despair and hunger. Elsa’s seek for a greater life for her kids takes them out west to California, the place issues become even worse. Whereas she by no means overcomes her low vanity about her appears to be like, 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 onerous to disregard as Hannah embodies her historical past lesson in what appears like a collection of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd feelings.

For devoted Hannah followers seeking a great cry.