This is a searing look at Depression/Dust Bowl/Migrant farmer camps in California, as previously depicted in Steinbeck’s famous Grapes of Wrath, but from the point of view of a woman. Almost as if the famous portrait by Dorothea Lange come to life.
Elsa Wolcott, raised in a prosperous Texas family in 1921, is a so-called old maid and is rejected by her family for her ungainly height and plain looks. One night, though, she takes a chance on Rafe Martinelli, the handsome young son of an Italian immigrant couple. In the back of a pick-up truck, far from town, they share their dreams of getting out of town, and one thing leads to another. Soon Elsa discovers she is pregnant, and is promptly (literally) kicked to the streets by her family. With nowhere else to go, she turns to Rafe’s family, and to her surprise, is welcomed in with open arms, despite having ruined his chance at college. In Rafe’s family, she finds the love her own family never gave her , and more and more, Rafe’s parents start to rely on this quiet hard-working girl.
But the land is rising up against them, and Rafe makes the decision to head for California, bringing his wife and children with him, and leaving his parents behind. Things are bleak in the migrant camps, and before long, Rafe is gone. That’s when Elsa’s previously hidden warrior spirit, as well as that of her spit-fire teenage daughter, slowly changes her life and that of those around her.
This was compulsively readable, with vivid characters and breathtakingly horrific accounts of what happened during those Dust Bowl years – human-related and otherwise.
