Abandoned by Booklikes

The Grapes of Wrath follows the Joad family after they have lost their tenement farmland in Oklahoma to California where they are told there are jobs waiting for those who are willing to farm the land out there.

The book starts out with Tom Joad who is finally paroled from prison. Tom has been dreaming of home for years and is shocked to see his family's home is abandoned. He runs into a former preacher, Jim Casy who explains that all of the people have lost their homes and land. Eventually running into a former neighbor Tom begins to hear about how the crops started to fail and how dust (apparently this is a thing in all of the books I read now) has ruined the crops and the land. Making his way to his family's new home he manages to catch up to them before they set out for California.

The entire Joad family came fully alive to me as I read because Steinbeck took such care to make all of them come alive. And it is not just them. As the family travels to California they meet and make mini-families with fellow travelers trying to do what they can in order to keep their families alive.

I have to say that Tom of course was my favorite followed by Ma Joad. Maybe because she wasn't taking any crap for anyone and she did what was necessary in order to try to keep her family together as long as possible.

I kept hoping throughout that of course things would work out for the family, but reading about how they were paying people barely anything and how many children/men/women were starving to death, I wonder how anyone back then was able to look another man in the eye and know that what they were paying them was nothing for them to exist on.

Steinbeck's writing flowed beautifully. In between each chapter doing what I would consider a status update on the Joads, readers get a almost lyrical essay about the Dust Bowl, Great Depression, mass immigration, working, starving, etc. I loved those chapters and though the whole book as a whole just worked.

I definitely needed some lightness while reading, and there was no lightness to be found.

Steinbeck just systematically tears away the readers blinders to what is happening in the United States during this time period, and how many farmers were still slow to recovery from this ordeal even though according to economists, the U.S. started to recover from the Great Depression by around 1938.

The setting comes truly alive and you are right there with the Joads as dust descends covering everything in it's path, sleeping in trucks/trailers trying to keep yourself going as long as you can with no food or water in order to just find a place to sleep for a few hours. I realized after the fact I was constantly eating while reading this book, just taking a nibble of food and drinking some water. I think it was a way to reassure myself that food was nearby and there was no chance that I could starve to death.

To sum up, I am sure that better reviews for this book have been and will be written.

I just have to say that I found this book from beginning to end wonderful.

It breaks your heart and puts it back together a million times while you are reading this story of the Joad family.

Towards the end I just felt a sense of dread for what would be coming their way and how would the family once again do their best to try to stay together and keep surviving. With an open ending, I would like to think that the Joad family managed to keep themselves going, and were able to just find a place where they could settle. That Ma Joad eventually got her little white house. That the men got to have meat and coffee with a little bit of sugar. That they had a piece of land that they could call their own.