Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I love historical fiction and had read "Nightingale," and "Great Alone," but suffered through this dreary indictment of America. Hannah never lets up on her Dust Bowl heroine, Elsa, a self-hating, homely woman who becomes pregnant and forced to marry the younger man and move in with his parents on a struggling farm. For half the book, repetitive dust storms, animals dying, no money, never ending hunger is exhausting and blamed on government mismanagement and greedy capitalists. Elsa's husband disappears so she decides to pack up her two children and head to California, a rumored paradise . If "Grapes of Wrath" had a short, plot-driven, trope-filled version, this would be it. The journey is told as if Hannah was reciting Wikipedia for the descriptions of hobos, Hoovervilles, and migrant camps and there are repetitive encounters where townspeople repeat, "We don't like your kind" and call them dirty animals. Another period of living along mud banks and working under oppressive white men is filled with never-ending indignities until alas the glorious Communists come to the rescue. It's not subtle, either, as Hannah describes the strike organizers as knights on shining armor against Capitalism- and of course the ugly duckling finds her soul mate and life calling. I know there were injustices and the Great Depression was brutal for many, but I like authors who "show" rather than "tell," and I particularly like fleshed out characters and the ability to come to my own political viewpoint without one hitting me over the head. And to make sure we get it, she tells you again in the afterward.