Elsa Martinelli had a miserable, loveless life, albeit a life of leisure, in her parents’ home in the pan handle of Texas. When she impulsively rebels against their demeaning restrictions on her life, Elsa becomes pregnant and is summarily dropped off at the boy’s home and disowned by her family. Thus begins her new life on the Martinelli farm, in a hasty marriage, where she grows to love the hard work and rewards of farm life. While married life with Rafe Martinelli is not the loving relationship she yearns for, her love for his parents, Tony and Rosa, for her children, Lareda and Anthony, and her love for the land make this a very satisfying life.

While the country feels the effects of the Great Depression, the farms of Texas begin to experience what will become known as the Dust Bowl. Hannah does an amazing job of describing the everyday, practical effects of the drought and subsequent dust storms, the tremendous work, and slow starvation and poverty visited on the farm families struggling to hold on to their land. Rafe cannot endure the hardships, and abandons the family, not telling them where he is heading. When Ant (Anthony) becomes gravely ill, Elsa is forced to migrate to California with the children, in hopes of building a secure life, with hopes of rejoining Tony and Rosa at a future time. This is where the story really begins, as the struggle between Elsa and teenage daughter Lareda changes and develops and the family must pull together for survival. “Oakies” as all migrants from the Dust Bowl, regardless of their home state, are called by Californians, are treated as less than human. Hard working, fiercely independent farmers, the migrants don’t want handouts, but do expect a fair wage for their toil in the fields. Like the Mexicans before them, the migrants are segregated, look down upon, and taken advantage of. They are expected to live on ridiculously low, starvation wages, in filthy, subhuman conditions. Elsa and her children survive and escape the Dust Bowl, only to experience the prejudice, ill treatment and starvation wages of California.

The heart of the story is about the power of love, love that is patience, love that perseveres, love that sacrifices. Love of a mother for her children, love for our community, love of the land. Elsa finds her confidence, her identity, her voice, her inner strength. Hannah has mined the memoirs of women who survived the Dust Bowl, and those families who traveled to California and suffered injustice there, yet struggled, fought, and persevered. While this can be a very depressing book—the struggle, suffering, and injustice are relentless— it has a satisfying, and very real ending. It is a long difficult journey of a story, but worth the trip in the end. Highly recommended.