TRAGIC MAGIC | Kirkus Reviews

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 instances 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 25th 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 method round Mama Rose’s kitchen, her marriage is rarely comfortable, the pleasures of early motherhood are transient, and shortly the disastrous droughts of the 1930s drive all of the farmers of the realm to despair and hunger. Elsa’s seek for a greater life for her youngsters takes them out west to California, the place issues develop 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 arduous to disregard as Hannah embodies her historical past lesson in what seems like a collection of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd feelings.

For devoted Hannah followers in the hunt for a superb cry.