Kept me listening

I had read of the Donner party and their desperate lapse into cannibalism after being trapped by winter weather in the mountains on their migration east but the author has created a very readable fiction around the unfortunate episode.
The characters are very well crafted and they draw you in. Well worth the purchase.

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Loved the story (not sure about the ethics)

A really gripping story. As an Australian, I had never heard of the Donner party. What a fascinating and horrific survival story.

Not sure of the ethics about demonising real historical people and accusing them of heinous crimes for the sake of storytelling though.

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A few loose ends didn’t get tied up...

This was an engaging story with lots of interesting characters, a lot of mystery and tension.

It kept you guessing what was going on and I didn’t want to stop listening.

My only issue is that it seemed a little underdeveloped, and it seemed a lot of loose ends didn’t quite get explained to my satisfaction.

There were so many main characters, and I would’ve liked more detail about what happened to each of them in the end.
Maybe I missed something, but one character seemed to have just disappeared with no explanation, and after following him through the whole book, that was unsatisfying.

I feel like a few extra chapters and a lot more follow-up detail would’ve been nice. There was mention in the middle of a few minor characters wandering off and never coming back, and I recall thinking it was out of the blue and wanted to get more information.

I feel like this could’ve been an amazingly epic story, a massive brick of a book, with a huge word count, something you could really sink your teeth into... (I’m thinking a historical version of The Stand or Under the Dome.)
But for whatever reason, it didn’t follow all the leads where I hoped it would.

Nevertheless it was a compelling story and the narrator was very good, and I will listen to it again for sure.

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1 person found this helpful

The Hunger left me hungry for more

I really enjoyed and got totally immersed in this book. The storyline was darkly fascinating and left me wanting more when it ended.
It felt like I was on journey with the wagon train and it has left me seeking more novels in the same vein.
I'm not normally a supernatural fan, but this felt plausible enough for me to get engrossed in it.

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1 person found this helpful

Engrossing

Loved this tale
The characters evolved throughout the story and I really enjoyed how the book was written with several entwining stories
Great
Highly recommend

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Great potential let down by a middling story

This fictionalised account of the doomed Donner party had so much potential to work with - man vs nature, the pioneering spirit, a voyage into an unknown wilderness, the fear of the unknown, cannibalism, Native American myths - but squanders it by never embracing these themes.

First the positives. Some of the scenes describing the wilderness are well done. There's a genuine sense of foreboding in the description of the wide prairies and endless salt flats. However, later scenes describing the nightmarish winter which ultimately doomed the group in real life are surprisingly flat. Beyond "it snowed a lot and the snow was deep and it was cold" there aren't really any visceral descriptions of the cold and its effects on the party.

Similarly, whilst it is made abundantly clear that the party are starving to the point of resorting to cannibalism, I never really felt the impact of their hunger. Instead of showing us the effects of severe, desperate hunger, we are just told "people were hungry." Descriptions of how the characters were coping with their starvation and the effects it was having on them physically and mentally are tellingly sparse.

I think a lot of this is the result of two main problems: you're never sure who the main character is and the "villain" is vague and ambiguous to the point of being forgettable. Without spoiling the story, the book can't decide if it wants to be a supernatural horror set against the bleak backdrop of the unknown wilderness or a more grounded take on a real life tragedy. Potentially amazing source material such as the Native myths are casually set aside in favour of a scientific explanation, which would be fine, except that the shadowy enemy is frequently framed in a supernatural light. As a result, the story is as confused as the characters themselves.

Finally, I found it difficult to empathise or connect with the characters, largely because I was never really certain who the main character/s was meant to be. Just when I thought it was X, the story focus would largely shift to Y. This more often than not resulted in me simply not caring if a given character was in danger.

The narration is actually pretty good. Voices are great and each character is distinct. I think th narrator did the best job they could given the fairly bland source material.

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