Growing up in Canada, I didn’t learn much about what was happening south of what would become our border in the 1840s, in the mass of land that is now the United States of America. I never played Oregon Trail and I never learned about the Mexican-American war, nor did I hear much about the Gold Rush beyond what I gleaned from field trips to local ghost towns and tourist “Forts” with live reenactments. Actually, I probably knew more about the infamous actions of the Donner Party than I did about the context of the Donner Party and the circumstances in which they set out. This was the value of Brown’s book for me—I was immersed in the expansive history as much as I was the daily life of the 1840s emigrant.

By focussing on the Graves family, and twenty-one-year-old newlywed Sarah Graves specifically, Brown immediately humanizes the group of individuals known as the Donner Party, allowing some of the distance created by the taboo nature and macabre tone that has come to characterize the Donner Party—of course, I mean the

cannibalism

—to dissipate. Though I think Brown made a conscious choice to balance the historical and scientific asides in such a way as to keep the reader connected to Sarah and her ever-more bleak circumstances, I would have been happy with even more of the digressions about other groups making similar journeys and other survivors of similar experiences. Finally, and perhaps most essentially, Brown inserts just enough of himself into the story to make you appreciate his admiration for Sarah and the rest of the Donner Party, while simultaneously delivering a great deal of information and emotion in this immersive read.

My one complaint is that this book could have really benefited from a map.