Answer Creek

Starred review from November 1, 2024
A historical novel looks at the Donner Party disaster through the eyes of a young woman. Ada Weeks, 19, is on a wagon train headed to California in 1846. The long trek has barely begun when she loses her adoptive parents to a raging river. In a flash, she has little but the clothes on her back, but the Breen family takes her on as a kind of nanny. Even at the best of times, the journey is relentlessly horrendous: heat, humidity, biting insects, snakes, choking dust, quagmires, swollen rivers, wagon breakdowns, exhausted and starving oxen, hostile Native Americans--the list goes on. But the wagon train pushes on, with these folks even entertaining themselves in the evenings. Then comes a fateful decision. Having lost precious time already, some in the party talk themselves into taking the new Hastings cutoff, supposedly a shortcut. Bad idea. The Great Salt Desert is a trip through hell and the trail often seems just a vague suggestion. The travelers fall further and further behind schedule and wind up stranded on the eastern slope of the Sierras at Truckee Lake as the worst winter storms in decades move in. The suffering is unimaginable, the deaths staggering. And then there's the cannibalism. Will Ada make it to California? Sweeney has blended Ada and a few other fictional characters seamlessly with real people--the Donners, the Breens, Pat Dolan (her first love), the Graveses, and the Reeds--who died tragically or survived miraculously during the ordeal that is fixed in the national consciousness. (There is a helpful list of characters and a map in the front matter.) The author is a master of vivid descriptions, dragging readers along every wretched mile of the trail, sharing every dashed hope and every dramatic confrontation, with Ada as their guide. Ada is a marvelous creation, twice orphaned and both hopeful and fearful about a new life in California, the promised land. And savor Sweeney's prose: "Hope was what used to fill our cup, Ada thinks.Now we are down to dregs." A vivid westward migration tale with an arresting mixture of history and fiction.

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April 20, 2020
Sweeney (Eliza Waite) returns with a florid fictional saga of the Donner Party. Tall, intelligent Ada Weeks is a 19-year-old orphan from Indiana on a wagon train from Independence, Mo., to Sutter’s Fort, Calif., in 1846. Ada’s hardiness, cooperative spirit, and medical know-how (acquired from her adoptive father, an undertaker) come in handy on the trail, and she looks after the children while the parents cook and gather fuel. She also starts up an affair with Patrick Dolan, an Irish teamster, and the two plan to marry. Sweeney’s character-driven and painstakingly researched coming-of-age story recounts the party’s daily exhausting struggles before reaching the ill-fated Truckee Lake east of the Sierras in California, where Ada spends the winter snowbound and starving, while those at other camps eventually resort to cannibalism. The author conveys the squalor of the cross-continental migration with frank descriptions of bodily functions, sex, and cannibalism in ways decidedly not for the squeamish. Ada is an impressive heroine who thinks for herself and exhibits moral courage in dire straits, and she chooses to eat glue, leather, and blankets rather than human flesh while pining for Patrick, who took a different route through the mountains. This succeeds at capturing the endurance of the human spirit.