This serves to create a sense of claustrophobia, a feeling that the coming tragedy isn’t just an accident of bad weather and poor leadership, but a matter of fate. Not surprisingly, each of her central characters has a past that he or she is trying to escape, and these pasts are intertwined. By focusing on a few figures, Katsu creates a riveting drama of power struggles and shifting alliances as bad fortune befalls these travelers. The wide-open spaces of the West feel closed in here, as there is nothing but danger and desolation beyond the tents and fires of the wagon train. This imaginative retelling of the group’s journey communicates the fatal naiveté of people who thought they could carry their comfortable lives across deserts and mountains, as well as the particular horrors that befell the families who followed George Donner. Westward migration, murder, sensation: the story of the Donner Party has all this, which makes it, in its way, a quintessentially American story. An inventive reimagining of a grisly chapter in American history.
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