The story focuses on the family's poverty, illness, and social injustice, and their attempts to survive and find happiness in the face of adversity.

In the spring, the Holbrooks leave the mining town, traveling across Nebraska and South Dakota, where their wagon is briefly immobilized by a storm.

During a heat wave, Anna continues to work alone, canning fruits to feed the family through the winter, while the children run the streets and scavenge in the dump.

The violence she experiences from her husband is in part reflected in the violent attitude she displays towards her children as she shouts at and beats them constantly.

In his attempt to make ends meet, he moves from one job to another, first, a coal miner, next, a farmer, and finally a meat packer.

The financial stress on the family is reflected on Jim's violent attitude towards his wife and kids: "He had nothing but heavy blows to the children and he struck Anna too often to remember" (9).

Ben is weak in body and suffers from lung disease especially when the family moves to the smelly, unclean area next to the packing houses.

Although her role is very limited in the novel, Bess closes the unfinished novel with an optimistic tone when she grabs a jar lid and bangs it enthusiastically against the floor.

As Deborah Rosenfelt put it, the novel focuses on: "the unparalleled satisfaction and fulfillment combined with the overwhelming all-consuming burden of motherhood.

"[2] Mazie watches Anna work tirelessly as a wife and mother, giving her health and happiness up for the benefit of her children.

To Mazie, motherhood is seen as a great sacrifice a mother gives to her children; yet, there are times when her responsibilities overlap causing the opposite effect.

These include poverty, education, working conditions, patriarchy and space; that is to say, with a few changes, their lives could be greatly improved, and violence and despair would decrease.

Yonnondio's unusual aesthetic represents a blending of these two discordant traditions, with the long passages of near-realism typical of the proletarian literary movement juxtaposed with intermittent, sharply contrasting interjections of poetic stream of consciousness.

Yonnondio!—unlimn'd they disappear; To-day gives place, and faces—the cities, farms, factories fade; A muffled sonorous sound, a wailing word is borne through the air for a moment, Then blank and gone and still, and utterly lost.

However, due to her pregnancy with her second child, her political activities and employment, she set aside the drafts of the unfinished books only to find them 40 years later while searching for another manuscript.

Critics have focused on a large variety of issues ranging from socialist-feminist portrayals of film in the novel to a diverse spectrum of various psychological concerns.

[6] MacPherson, for instance, has looked extensively at the ways in which Olsen's characters' representations portray complicated issues of class in relation to psychological escapism.

By comparing Yonnondio with Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth, Rosenfelt reveals the ways in which female sexuality is downplayed in the novel.

Rosenfelt suggests this occurs as a direct result of Olsen's readings of communist theory, much of which was surprisingly conservative and patriarchal in its attitudes towards women in the 1930s.

Rosenfelt also argues that the Holbrook children (especially Mazie) are explicitly socialized into accepting traditional, limiting views of sex and gender.

Rosenfelt links the cruel behaviors of Anna (her abuse of her children) directly back to the inevitable result of living within a patriarchal, capitalist regime.

Lyons has argued that, although somewhat sparsely portrayed, Olsen's own Jewish background is uniquely represented within the characterization of Anna during her recollections of her grandmother, and also her numerous candle-lighting rituals.

[9] Lyons links Anna's practices with the behaviors of Eva in Olsen's famous short story "Tell Me a Riddle."

The scholar Anthony Dawahare has notably written on the book's "dialectical and utopian consciousness" as it relates specifically to "the authorial voice."

He recognizes the crucial role Yonnondio plays in representing the resurrected ideals concerning certain dialectical, utopian philosophies that were increasingly being revived during the mass labor movements occurring in the U.S. during the era of the Great Depression.