Discussion questions for The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

1. Compare the poverty of life in Texas to the hardships of life in the migrant worker camps.  Which do you think was harder for Elsa?  For Loreda and Ant?
2. What did you think about Jack and Elsa’s romance?
3. Why do you think Loreda chose to return to California to go to college?
4. The Washington Post‘s reviewer wrote: “The evaporation of water, the withering of seedlings, the boredom of unemployment — such calamities are not easy to dramatize, but as the drought grinds on, Hannah makes the heat radiate off these pages.” Do you agree with the reviewer about the vividness of the writing?
5. The Washington Post‘s reviewer went to say: “Of course, when The Grapes of Wrath appeared in 1939, much of America was crippled by the poverty that Steinbeck had reported on for the San Francisco News. A few months later, when Congress began hearings on wages and farm regulations, his novel felt devastatingly current.  Hannah’s negotiation with this 80-year-old material — during a global pandemic that’s weighing on our economy — is necessarily more complicated. She’s examining a traumatic era in American history while also using it to reflect on the current scourges of xenophobia and economic exploitation tearing through the United States.”   Do you think that Hannah is successful in showing us the present through this particular lens of history?
6. Kirkus‘s reviewer says: “The pedantic aims of the novel are hard to ignore as Hannah embodies her history lesson in what feels like a series of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd emotions.”  This is similar to the Washington Post’s reviewer’s conclusion, but both also found the emotions the book evoked to be genuine.  Did you cry at the end?

For more questions, check out Kristin Hannah’s website.

Want to share your own questions with us?