Impatient with Desire: The Lost Journal of Tamsen Donner

by Gabrielle Burton

The Donner Party You know how some died. Here’s how some lived. “My heart is big with hope and impatient with desire.” — Tamsen Donner, a letter to her sister In the spring of 1846, Tamsen Donner, her husband, George, their five daughters, and eighty other pioneers headed west on the California-Oregon Trail in eager anticipation of new lives in California. Everything that could go wrong did, and an American legend was born. The Donner Party. We think we know their story—starving pioneers trapped in the mountains performing an unspeakable act to survive — but we know only that one harrowing part of it. Impatient with Desire brings to stunning life a woman—and a love story—behind the myth. Historians have long known that Tamsen kept a journal, though it was never found. In Impatient with Desire , Burton imagines this lost journal—and paints a picture of a remarkable heroine in an extraordinary situation.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Historical, Book Club, Adult Fiction, American, Adult

256 pages, Paperback

First published March 9, 2010

About the author

Died September 3, 2015.

Gabrielle Burton, awarded an MFA in screenwriting from the American Film Institute, currently splits her time between her Buffalo home and Los Angeles, where she is involved with her daughters' Five Sisters Production Company. Burton is the author of Heartbreak Hotel as well as the nonfiction work I'm Running Away from Home, But I'm Not Allowed to Cross the Street: A Primer on Women's Liberation (1972).

Reviews

[Theresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had never heard of the Donner Party nor knew anything about another way to travel west besides the Oregon Trail. So, when I sat down with this book, I had no expectations besides being entertained. I didn't expect Tamsen Donner to catch my heart and hold it through her journal entries and letters to her sister. My heart went out to the families and men that traveled in the party, and every time one died, I could feel the heartbreak and mounting concern that each one brought, as if I, too, was traveling with them. Tamsen was a strong and courageous voice that had such spirit and dignity, even in times when she felt her hope dwindling.

Gabrielle Burton gave Tamsen such a powerful voice. One, that I'm sure, captured the essence of who Tamsen was. I was impressed by how much research went into this novel, and how Gabrielle spent time on the same trail to get the feel of what it must have been like for the Donners. This was an amazing book and a fantastic piece of historical fiction that should be read by everyone. "Impatient with Desire" is a masterful piece of work that captures the pioneer spirit and brings to light the sacrifice, commitment and disappointments each adventurer had to endure. I look forward to reading more by this author!

[Laurie Notaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificent book. One of the absolute best I have read in the last several years. Highly recc.

[Carmen Miller]

RTC

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Westward Ho!
Who wants to go to California without it costing them anything?
As many as eight young men of good character, who can drive an ox team, will be accommodated by gentlemen who will leave this vicinity about the first of April.
Come on, Boys. You can have as much land as you want without costing you anything. The Government of California gives large tracts of land to persons who move there.
~George Donner and Others~ (advert in the Sangamo Journal, 1946)

Oh, pioneers. The Donner Party was one of the first wagon trains headed to California in 1846--mostly women and children. They didn't make it over the Sierra Nevada mountains in time and were stranded for 5 months in record-breaking snowstorms. They ended up subsisting on boiled strips of cowhide, their dogs, and eventually turn to the unthinkable...

We are the Donner Party. My husband, George Donner, was the Captain. My name is Tamsen Eustis Dozier Donner [...] Almost one year ago [my husband, five daughters and I] left Springfield, Illinois, eager to go to California. We have no doubt it will be advantageous for our children. Chain up, boys! Chain up! (p. 238)

It's believed that Tamsen did keep a diary over the long winter in the mountains, though it was never found. I thought the writer did a fantastic job imagining and exploring the personal interactions as the party resist the slide into animal behavior over the long winter. She did her research, too. The title (though it sounds like a bodice ripper) is taken from an actual letter Tamsen wrote about her impatience to travel and see and experience things. She writes at night in her snow-covered shelter to the light of a burning pine cone, sometimes detailing the days events, or reminiscing of her childhood, her past marriages and lost children, occurrences on the trail to the West. The journal is jumbled because at some point Tamsen rips the binding to remove the leather cover. Despite the subject, it never strays into lurid or gratuitous tone--I found the writing quite beautiful and poetic.

I log deaths. Accidents. When death stalks, do some people go out to meet it? Why do some people lie down and die? How far can a person be pushed until she stops caring about others? I am a schoolteacher doing life and death sums (p. 198)

[guiltlessreader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally posted on Guiltless Reading

Not a trashy romance. Really.

The book in one sentence: Tamsen Donner recounts the ill-fated journey of 80+ pioneers through the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1846.

My thoughts: I received Impatient with Desire yesterday in the mail through the LibraryThing Early Bird Reviewers, and I got just a bit of an eyeroll from the hubby when he saw the title of the book. I've sort of sworn off trashy romance novels - and this is what this book seemed to be about - an illicit romance with lots of steamy sex scenes! The cover design sends off mixed signals too - despite the cool mountain panorama, the flowered detail at the bottom again suggests romance. (If you ask me, the title really should be changed; it's misleading - for those who expect a trashy romance, and for those on the lookout for a non-trashy read.)

I had a little explaining to do, that it was historical fiction based on the tribulations of pioneering Americans migrating to California. I found the subject matter fascinating, provoking, if not a bit depressing, but highlighting the tenacity of the human spirit despite whatever life throws. The fact that it is a well-researched piece of fiction underscores that history can come alive, especially told from a first-person point of view; Tamsen Donner is a force to be reckoned with as she is the epitome of the stubborn lover, the ferocious mother, and the strong woman of the time.

I had a bit of a problem with the chronology of this book as it got a little confusing, despite the highly detailed accounts and lists of people in the story.

First line: Think of all the roads a man a woman walk until they reach the road they'll walk together.

Last line: Chain up!

Verdict: Kudos to Gabrielle Burton on this riveting read! I couldn't put it down,

[Susan (aka Just My Op) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks again to Tara, my friend who makes sure I never run out of good things to read.

“All that just to get here. All that grief and confusion and chicanery and betrayal and carelessness and death just to get us here to these dull, thudding, stuporous, barely noticeable deaths.”

“I am a school teacher doing life and death sums.”

Impatient with Desire is the fictionalized story of the very real and tragic Donner Party travels to reach California in 1846 and 1847. Written from the viewpoint of Tamsen Donner, wife of George Donner, leader of the party, Tamsen left letters that the author was able to read. The story is told mostly as journal entries or letters to Tamsen's sister, Betsey. The trip took almost a year, and the time the travelers were stranded was more than four months. There are frequent referrals to incidents I thought perhaps I had missed or overlooked in my reading, but they are explained later in the story. The story is not told linearly but moves back and forth among the time before the trip, the early trip, and the days camped on Donner Pass.

As in any good fiction adventure, there is courage, betrayal, and an unfathomable amount of hardship. While I wish there were more facts and less fictionalization, what really happened is greatly lost, and this story is built from the bones of what is known. Still, this is a highly readable but sad story of what perhaps happened.

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book covers the ill fated journey of the Donner Party in their quest for a new life in California. The narrator is Tamsen Donner, who documents the trip in a journal/letter written to her sister who stayed behind. While the Donners and their five daughters are the main focus, a lot of the story is about other members who joined and left the party for various reasons. Burton did a great deal of research on the historical facts, but the truth is that there is still a lot of mystery surrounding the trip and especially the fateful winter of 1846/7 when 87 members of the party were snowbound and starving in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The famous cannibalism the survivors were forced into is played low key attention. Instead, the book is about what it takes to stay a family, and a person, during such terrifying times, and, most importantly, how to keep hope alive. Burton has a deft hand with setting and atmosphere, and I can still see, feel, taste and smell what it was like in those cold, dark shelters during that terrible winter. This is a tale not easily forgotten.

[Elevate Difference · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impatient with Desire is the story of Tamsen Donner, now-legendary westward pioneer. Tamsen was forty-five when she set out on the California-Oregon Trail with her husband and five children in the spring of 1846. Stranded by early snows, Tamsen and the other Donner Party pioneers spent a harrowing four months in the Sierra Nevadas without supplies. Tamsen sent her daughters out with relief parties and stayed behind with her wounded husband; she died sometime in April 1847, leaving only her letters and a journal that was never recovered. Impatient with Desire is a recreation of that lost journal.

Burton’s meticulously researched account mingles her own prose with phrases from Tamsen’s extant letters, with engaging results. From her shelter in the Sierra Nevadas, Tamsen remembers her girlhood in Newburyport, her courtship and marriage with her second husband, the bustle of their preparations to move west, and the hardships of trail life. Burton captures the voice of this remarkable woman, a schoolteacher and botanist who traveled alone from Massachusetts to Illinois and left behind a spirited collection of letters to her sister Betsey. “In my lifetime people have sometimes wondered at my conduct, but they have never despised me,” Tamsen writes, thinking back over her travels. “And I shall never be despised.”

Tamsen’s independence does not go too far, however, in securing her voice on the trail. One of the most harrowing moments in Impatient with Desire is a campfire scene where the party’s men debate over whether or not to take the Hastings Cutoff, the ill-advised shortcut that ultimately left them stranded. Sitting beyond the circle of men with her journal on her lap, Tamsen records the fateful vote, convinced that no woman in the party would have agreed to the decision. Months later, searching for empty spaces in her filled journal, Tamsen muses, “You can write a whole book in the margins.” Tamsen’s marginalized pages remind us of marginalized voices: a “schoolteacher doing life and death sums,” Tamsen is at once a mother, wife, traveler, scribe, voteless companion.

Despite her exclusion from trail politics, Tamsen still maintains an equal companionship with her second husband George. The story of their marriage blends the objects and scenes of memory with the bleak mountain campsite. These vivid recollections—holidays and children’s birthdays, the decision to move West, the frenzy of preparations, and the excitement as the party sets out from Independence—bring Tamsen alive as a historical figure. Reminiscence finally yields to grim inventory as, in spare, elegant language, Tamsen records taking apart her family’s shelter, her botany collection, even her journal cover, for sustenance.

Burton’s Impatient with Desire is more evenly composed than her memoir about her cross-country journey in Tamsen’s tracks, Searching for Tamsen Donner. I began the book a bit skeptical about its valorization of the American frontier, and I kept reading because I wanted more Tamsen. Donner Party lore has often focused on the cannibalism of the pioneers (confirmed facts about the Donner Party’s struggles are notoriously scanty). Burton deftly negotiates this tale of outward struggle to bring us a story of inner survival as well. I read Impatient with Desire with a kind of grim fascination; Tamsen’s endurance and the powerful elegance of her narration stayed with me long after I finished the book.

Finely crafted and spellbinding in the calm pain of its heroine, Impatient with Desire is historical fiction at its best. Readers interested in women’s history, westward expansion, wilderness tales, and historical fiction will find much to ponder.

Review by Barbara Barrow

[Orsolya · Rating 1 out of 5]

Historical fiction novels are quite useful in their ability to introduce readers to topics they are unfamiliar with (and hopefully, this is done accurately). Admittedly, I don’t know much beyond the basics about the Donner Party; which is precisely why I turned to Gabrielle Burton’s “Impatient with Desire” for my lesson. Sadly, “Impatient with Desire” is not what I expected at all. Instead of an intimate, meaty novel surrounding the possible feelings and events involving the Donners; Burton instead presents a thin-as-soup novel in the format of a fictional diary of Tamsen Donner.

The format isn’t the negative issue, per se. This type of novel has the potential to provide a bonding look at the psyche of the characters and can therefore be quite riveting. However, “Impatient with Desire” offers diary entries which are so short and lack such substance; that there is hardly a plot/story at all. Each entry is more of a sputtering of a few random facts involving too many characters to keep track of. There is no flow and not much is learned (nor is much curiosity sparked). Burton’s work reminds me of school projects as a child where we had the option to create a diary/journal for a historical figure.

Further adding to the absence of depth is Tamsen’s inability to truly describe her feelings or provide an insightful look at the world around her. Again, there is much potential which wasn’t tapped and thus “Impatient with Desire” is executed poorly. Plus, the constant back-and-forth between current events and past memories lead to confusion.

As “Impatient with Desire” progresses, it does evoke some deeper emotions and pity towards those pioneers who ventured to California. However, this new depth in the novel still doesn’t necessarily provide a growth specifically to the Donners, as information on an intimate level is still lacking. Comparably, Burton’s writing isn’t consistent as the imagery starts to become vivid and interesting but then she proceeds to cut herself short (sparks the phrase “just when it was getting good”).

Naturally, the climax of “Impatient with Desire” occurs when the Donner Party begins to eat the deceased members and also begin to lose their sanity. Burton successfully opposes the general negative connotations surrounding this event and displays the struggles the Donners would have felt.

Equally stirring was the death of George Donner which would rouse any reader who is in a loving relationship. Sadly though, this ending was rushed and not as elaborated on as it could have been.

I give Burton credit for attempting to portray an event which lacks in resources. Burton (as expressed in her Author Notes) is fervently obsessed with Tamsen Donner and the Donner Party; and has conducted decades of research. Unfortunately, her novel lacked depth and even imagination (which could have “played with” the lack of resources). Basically, I learned more from Burton’s Author Notes than from her novel (although I didn’t like her using Wikipedia as a botany source).

Overall, “Impatient with Desire” isn’t a strong historical fiction novel, nor does it answer Donner-related questions; but it does create respect towards the pioneers who emigrated West (especially since I live in California).

[Candida · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is tastefully written. It offers a view of what the Donner party suffered through the eyes of Tamsin Donner.

[Emily · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nabokov once said (and I paraphrase heavily) that a true reader is a re-reader, so my main rating system on here has been based primarily on the question: would I re-read this? The short answer for "Impatient with Desire" is a flat no. But the answer to the *perhaps* more important question, "Did this book inspire a burning desire--an impatient one, you might say--inside me to read anything and everything on the subject at hand?" is an emphatic YES!

Burton's curiosity about the Donners led her to this interesting project--that is, to compile all known documents written by and about Tamsen Donner into a piece of creative non-fiction in the form of her diary--but it seemed to fall short of its lofty aims. The "diary" starts when the Donners are already trapped in the Sierra Nevada, and the reader learns of their tragic path to said wintery hellhole through flashbacks in Tamsen's diary. Talk about suspending belief that a woman nibbling at her ox skin rug for nourishment under 20 feet of snow with 4+ kids and a gangreneous husband in a hastily constructed tent-shanty felt compelled to document conversations verbatim between members of the wagon train four months prior. I mean, really.

I will say that, given my slight aversion to the medium (a faux diary of a real person?!), it did afford a few advantages, at least when it came to my emotional attachment to Tamsen & co. Towards the end when the rest of the party has been rescued or died and it's just Tamsen and George Donner left, him with his gangrene and her with her strong will, they exit their dank shanty to spend a few minutes in the glistening snow. Tamsen's memory flashes back to happier times: the day they met, their wedding day, the beginning of the Trail. Her memory of the 4th of July on the Trail--"America's 70th birthday"--and the joy all the pioneers felt as they danced and fiddled and made merry in their 19th century way made me tear up a little. To have all that hope and independence and freedom and joy, and to end up eating your neighbor's body in a frozen shack in the mountains thousands of miles from home? God, can you possibly imagine?

[Kirsten · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has an excellent story to tell (that of the Donner party), but ultimately the structure of the novel gets in its own way too much. At the beginning, there is too much telling and not enough showing (including some lists that are basically passenger manifests: make that a list of dramatis personae before the first chapter and be done with it!). Because the author chose to focus only on their time while trapped and snowbound (i.e. nothing was happening), much of the book is taken up with flashbacks, but these are so confusing and randomly ordered that it takes until the end of the book to really get all the characters straight. I would have preferred a book that started chronologically at the beginning of their journey in Independence and then followed them - through all the deaths and tragedies and minor triumphs - across the country, all of which might have served as character development. Then when they are trapped, and people start dying, I might have felt some personal connection to them. As it was, they were just random strangers who had made a lot of mistakes to get where they were.

The author also makes the classic mistake - so common with biographies and historical fiction - of totally falling in love with her heroine. She assigns her modern feminist principles (why not?), she does not permit her to fall into cannabalism as early as the others (Tamsen cooks the meat for her family, but does not eat it herself - why?), and at the end, she cannot bring herself to actually say what Tamsen's fate was, leaving the reader to go search the Internet on her own. A little factual historical note to the effect of "Tamsen Donner was dead when the next wave of rescuers reached the camp", and maybe explaining some of the controversy around that issue, would have been a better ending than her possibly going a little mad at her husband's death. As is, it is a very weak ending.

[Carly Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fast read about the Donner Party western expedition of 1847. Narrated in the first person by Tamsen Donner (the wife of George Donner, the leader of the wagon train) as a series of diary entries and letters to her sister Betsey, this novel captures the plight of the trapped would be settlers. The narrative jumps back and forth in time as Tamsen writes of her first husband, happy second marriage to George Donner, the beginning of the westward trek, and the horrible circumstances that lead to the party's becoming stranded in the Sierra Nevadas; the story is not told chronologically - Tamsen writes while being trapped in the mountains and relates events presently occurring and then includes stories of the past which are also not related chronologically. The subject of cannibalism is handled with sensitivity and is not overtly gore or sensationalistic. Burton creates a memorable character in Tamsen Donner; she is a strong, adventurous woman eager to explore new places but deeply in love with her husband and committed to her daughters. The title, Impatient with Desire, refers to Tamsen's own feelings regarding her wanderlust. Most of Tamsen's feelings and motivations are imagined since the historical Tamsen is not well known. I enjoyed this novel and thought the author did a wonderful job of capturing the tension and claustrophobia of being trapped in the mountains. I would be hesitant to recommend this to readers not interested in the historical Donner party or Western expansion historical fiction.

[Tara Chevrestt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. What a tragic story. This novel is about the Donner party that left Illinois for California in 1846. Tamsen Donnor is the wife to the "captain" and it's thru her letters to her sister and her lapses into the past that readers live the tragedy of the trail again. Their problems don't stop at broken wheel axles and ornery oxen, rather more troubles arise from people not getting along than anything else. There is murder, abandonment, and a man named Hastings promising a short cut that turns out to be a huge mistake. It doesn't help that the children to adult ratio is about five to one or thereabouts. One by one people in the wagon train die as they grow trapped in the mountains for the entire winter. Food runs out and they begin to eat the hides that make the roof over their heads. When they run out of roof, what then?

Thru hunger and sickness and death, Tamsen continues to write in her journal and write letters to her sister. The only thing holding this back from the five star mark is the "jumping around." Readers will have to pay very close attention to the dates as Tamsen talks about the present situation and then suddenly relates how so and so died two months ago and then the memories from life in Illinois come up. Very confusing and hard to follow at times. The story was also told somewhat backwards, starting at the present and gradually working its way back. A worthwhile read tho.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gabrielle Burton’s “Impatient with Desire” details the ill-fated emigration of the Donner party in 1846. The novel unfolds though journal entries and letters written by Tamsen Donner and provides an intimate perspective to one of the most notorious and mythologized chapters in American history.

I have to give props to Burton for creating an interesting fictional narrative out of the little-known and often contradictory facts about the Donner party history. Tamsen is a fascinating character – a strong-willed yet sympathetic woman who must endure horrors inflicted upon her family by wilderness, isolation, hybris, and desperation. Burton does a wonderful job bringing together historical detail with a tender narrative voice. We all know the horrific ends to which the Donner party resorts, and this narrative suspensefully recreates the mindset and circumstances that leads to those ends.

From a technical perspective, the novel is melodramatic, choppy, and somewhat inconsistent. It’s easy to forgive Burton these flaws, though, because she sensitively, poetically tells a story that could easily have devolved into Grand Guignol.

[Tattered Cover Book Store]

Jackie says:

This book covers the ill fated journey of the Donner Party in their quest for a new life in California. The narrator is Tamsen Donner, who documents the trip in a journal/letter written to her sister who stayed behind. While the Donners and their five daughters are the main focus, a lot of the story is about other members who joined and left the party for various reasons. Burton did a great deal of research on the historical facts, but the truth is that there is still a lot of mystery surrounding the trip and especially the fateful winter of 1846/7 when 87 members of the party were snowbound and starving in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The famous cannibalism the survivors were forced into is played low key attention. Instead, the book is about what it takes to stay a family, and a person, during such terrifying times, and, most importantly, how to keep hope alive. Burton has a deft hand with setting and atmosphere, and I can still see, feel, taste and smell what it was like in those cold, dark shelters during that terrible winter. This is a tale not easily forgotten.

[Kilian Metcalf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Your husband is dying. Your children are dying. You are dying. The rescue party has arrived, but your husband is too weak to leave. Do you stay with your husband and share his fate, or abandon him and leave with your children? This is the decision faced by Tamsen Donner, snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains with the remnants of the ill-fated Donner Party. Written in the form of a collection of letters never mailed and journal entries, Impatient with Desire is a fictional exploration of the personalities of one of the most famous groups to travel west. This well-researched and well-written account of their adventures and failure will appeal to readers who enjoy history and true-life adventure stories.

[Sharon Huether · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impatient with Desire: The Lost Journal of Tamsen Donner by Gabrielle Burton Thankyou Goodreads for sending me such a moving book. I've always been interested in the Donner Party; traveling on that pass many times. This book was partly fiction, but based on Tamsens letters to her sister back East. Plans were made by the leader, George Donner to travel on a past traveled route to California, however when others heard about a shortcut, thats were most of the Party wanted to travel. The shortcut became their undoing. It was love and sacrifice that kept the family alive. The children survived. A quote from the book "West of the West lies a country of the mind".

[Leah Weisse · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read an advanced copy of this novel written from the point of view of Tamsen Donner, wife of the Captain of the Donner Party. It goes into more than just the story of the trek and the long winter in the mountains. It gives you a really good idea of life in mid-1800 America. Just make sure you eat before reading it!

[Kate. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"When we came here, we were all strangers to ourselves," says [this fictionalized version of] Tamsen Donner, who chronicled that notorious ill-fated trek West in 1846. She is right. And I hope I never know myself as well as she knew herself after those long months of squalid starvation in the Sierra Nevadas.

[Dawnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

such a fascinating read!

and actually quiet a fitting one at the times of corona lock downs and not being able to leave and so many people complaining about how bad they are having it while sitting at home having everything they could possibly need - and then reading this book where people are actually on a horrendous lockdown unable to leave not at all having what they need to survive but fighting and hoping and doing their best for months.

i think the author did a great job in giving a real person and real people fictional voices and building a fictional story around real events.
she made the story feel real, by injecting the fictional moments, feelings and thoughts that made this book so very readable and an utterly emotional read -for me at least!

the moments where people died or animals where killed, hard decisions had to be made and everything seemed hopeless... it all seemed very real to me on this book and that i think shows how well the author did her work.

i think this is worth a read if you have any interested in it.

but be warned it’s not a book that shy’s away from traumatic realities of such situations!
people do horrible things to survive and hunger is a terrible companion that makes people do things they would normally never even think about.

[Marisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Adequate but not really something I’d shove down my friends’ throats. I was super excited to read this because of the natural and macabre interest in the story of the Donner Party, but I didn’t much care for Tamsen. I feel extra guilty even admitting that because I read the Author’s Note at the end, and this novel is closely intertwined with her emotional connection to Tamsen. Her genuine love and dedication to the real life people who lived and died on this journey are beautiful, and I’m only sad I didn’t like the book as much as I wanted to. Fictional historical journals are such a hit or miss for me, and they usually wind up being misses, so I’m not overly surprised that I didn’t care for the way this book was written despite the cool concept.

Overall, it’s not a waste of a read, but I don’t think I’d ever care to read it again, nor would I put it in a top 30 list of favorite historical fiction.

[Esther · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh Tamsen/Tamzene, why oh why were you such a good nurse. Surely George Donner could not have survived as long as he did had his wife been a smidgeon less devoted, less dedicated.

I'm reminded of Sophie's choice, but Sophie's tormenters were men of unimaginable, hideous cruelty. Tamsen's tormenter had never harbored an evil thought, was, in fact, incapable of forming thought at all. It was insentient, it was implacable, it was indifferent, it was the weather.

By choosing to stay with George, Tamsen effectively orphaned five little girls, her own three, aged 6, 5, and 3, and her two youngest step-daughters, aged 14 and 12. She had to have known that George was never going to make it out of the mountains; to make the choice she made, her mother's heart must have believed beyond doubt that she herself would.

If she thought that she would survive, she was wrong. As a consequence, five little Donners found themselves on the California side of the Sierras, alone, destitute, without family, at the mercy of strangers.

Traumatized by their recent ordeal, and terrified by their prospects, the two eldest had become the heads of the remaining family, with three tiny sisters to feed and clothe and care for. The eldest married immediately, out of desperation, a bride at 14. The remaining four were shuttled from pillar to post...sometimes together, sometimes not.

Oh, Tamsen. Had you known what the future would hold for your five little girls, as orphans in the California you and George never lived to see, would you have made the same choice?

[Mark Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone who is interested in the Donner family journey in the 1840s across this country, trying to reach California should definitely read this extremely well written book. Although Mrs. Donner’s diary was never found, this author has written a facsimile diary. The story is filled with the desperation and heartache only a wife and mother could feel. The author, who died a few years ago, made this struggle her life’s passion. She and her family of a five daughters actually traveled the actual Donner Trail and visited the sites, pertinent to their story as a field trip when the authors daughters were young.

[Have Faith And Read · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was recommended by Phylicia Masonheimer in one of her newsletters.

5 stars

This story made me ponder so many questions. I think the Donner Party gets a bad rap for the decisions they made (especially when it comes to cannibalism) but honestly…if my children were starving before my eyes, wouldn’t I do the same? The author admits in her ending note that the facts of what happened on those mountains with the Donner Party are few and far between, but she intensely researched and added in minor details. I know I won’t soon forget her tale.

[Ruby]

This was not at all what I was expecting. I pulled a short-looking book off the shelf that I could try to finish in one sitting. This was a surprisingly readable fictional re-telling of the Donner party and the decisions that lead them to being stuck in the mountains over an entire winter, and eventually resorting to cannibalism.

Part of what made it so readable was how gorgeously the book is laid out and the artwork sprinkled throughout.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

With that title, one could easily assume this is a historical romance. Imagine my surprise when I started reading only to find myself in the middle of the Donner party😱. Quite a shock. I appreciate the author’s efforts at trying to bring some humanity back into this situation, but it’s just a bit too pat for me. Good effort and writing was fine. The journal style was interesting if a touch confusing with the dates. Read at your own risk. 3 stars

[Gemma Whelan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is a tribute to an American pioneer; a deftly built story of a journey from high hopes to a kind of hell, a psychological portrait of a mother whose passion above all else is to sustain her children, and a story of a marriage of equals in a time when such an idea was not commonly entertained. In “Impatient with Desire,” Gabrielle Burton captures the heart and spirit of a unique woman and adds a deeply human layer to a tragic chapter in America’s journey westward.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow!! What a gut-wrenching story. I haven't seen much written about the Donner party in the historical fiction genre and, although the dialogue and some events were fictionalized, it gave a more realistic picture of what these individuals had to endure. I wonder if all mothers would do the same thing if their children were starving....The vast number of characters was sometimes confusing...as was the back and forth in time...but, overall an excellent and informative book.

[Erika · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I started this book, I almost gave up on it because I didn’t think I’d like it and didn’t think it would move quickly. I’m glad I decided to keep going. Earlier this year, I read another book about the Donner Party that made me dislike the Donner family. This book made me come to like them, and even want to cry for them at the end.