The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride by Daniel James Brown

When I found out I was going to be driving to Michigan and back, I started doing research into riveting audiobooks on reddit. One of the recommendations was The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown and it was available to borrow from the library right away, so I immediately downloaded it. Brown is the author of The Boys in the Boat, which is another relatively popular nonfiction book - I haven't read that one, but if you're wondering where you've heard that name, that's probably where. 

As I started writing this review, it got long and out of control. TL;DR: I liked this book. I would probably eat my dog. 

In April of 1846, Sarah Graves set out with her brand new husband, her parents, and her eight siblings from their home in Illinois to head west to California in a covered wagon pulled by oxen. They eventually start traveling with a larger group and by December, the brutal winter snows in the Sierra Nevada Mountains have trapped them less than one hundred miles from their destination. This book puts the focus on Sarah as a character we follow from the beginning of the journey to the end. It's an interesting choice of a character because unlike many others in the Donner party, Sarah did not leave a journal, she did not talk about her experience to the media afterwards, and the mentions of her in other people's narratives are brief. All of that said, centering the story around a woman was smart and made the story less about ADVENTURE and FREEDOM and more about LIMITED CHOICES for women and CHORES. (Although Sarah did not have any children while she was on this journey, so that made her an unusual woman in that way.) 

There's a lot here. The travelers in this group had left Independence, Missouri weeks later than was recommended. They attempted an unproven shortcut suggested by a charlatan. They made bad choice after bad choice and then once they got to a path in which they had to take the high (hard) road or the low (easy) road, it is easy to see why they chose the low road, even as it was a no good, very bad idea.

Here are questions I thought a lot about as I was reading this story:

1) What kind of person does it take to decide to travel across the country in a covered wagon? Seriously. Is it bravery? Stupidity? Desperation? The Graves family was doing just fine in Illinois - they had a prosperous farm and were popular with their neighbors. What could possibly convince them that they needed to do this? 

2) Even if Sarah had not wanted to go, she had no choice once her husband and father decided that they would. Do we still see this lack of autonomy for women today? What were Sarah's options if she'd wanted to stay in Illinois?

3) Can you imagine what it smelled like? Forget being forced to stay in makeshift cabins while the snow is taller than a human and the smell of food, sweat, feces, and fear, but even just being in the wagon in the open prairie? These people were not bathing regularly, they were driving oxen and herding cows, there were family dogs, and can you even imagine how dirty everyone was? Don't get met started on the body lice and disease. 

4) What would you be prepared to do to survive? Would you eat your family dog? Your oxen that you need to pull you to safety? Another human if they died of natural causes/starvation? Would you decide that murdering someone to increase resources for you and your family is a moral decision? Look, it's easy for me to say that I'd never eat my dog, but if I hadn't had food in twelve days and my body started digesting its own proteins and my general irritableness/mental illness intensified, I mean, who knows what I would do? (NOTE: I have no plans to eat Hannah.)

5) Were the survivors of this ordeal heroes or just people doing what they had to do to make it out of the mountains? I have complicated feelings about people who are adventuring and things go badly. Like, we have to send out the Coast Guard to get you because you took your yacht out in hurricane conditions? It's why I found Cheryl Strayed frustrating in Wild and why I felt like screaming at Christopher McCandless for being an idiot in Into the Wild. But the Donner party was not out living off the grid on a lark and it's hard to put modern motivations and descriptors on them. 

A few other things I want to mention about this book. Brown is amazing and writing succinct, coherent explanations of complicated topics. His précis on the Blackhawk War was perfection, his description of what happens to your body at the cellular and mental level as starvation sets in was the most riveting science writing I've read in a long time, and the way he clearly states what he knows from primary sources, what he's inferring from primary sources, and what he has gathered from personal research like walking the trail on his own makes this social scientist proud. 

Brown does have a writing tic I found distracting in that he'll be telling part of a story and then say something ominous like "but there were forces a thousand miles away that were working against the Graves family." He did this SO MANY TIMES in the book. I did not care for this. I also did not particularly enjoy the audiobook narrator's voice, but your mileage may vary on that.

Bottom line. I liked this book. It made me think and be grateful for all I have in 2024. 4.5/5 stars

Line of note:

It is difficult for us, with our 21st century view of the earth, replete with satellite imagery, the internet, 24-hour news broadcasts, GPS systems, and high resolution topographical maps, to comprehend just how potentially terrifying it was for the snowshoe party to come to any fork in what they imagined to be their route to salvation. They knew all too well that a wrong turn, any wrong turn, could mean the difference between living and dying. (timestamp 6:22:03)

Look, this is NOT difficult for me to imagine. I have been lost in the incredibly small town where I live before. I have no sense of direction at all. *sigh* How did I ever get around pre-GPS?  

Hat mentions (why hats?):

He seldom wore shoes and never wore a hat. (timestamp 30:42)

They pulled on woolen socks and battered boots. Franklin and Jay dressed in woolen trousers, woolen shirts, and woolen hats. (timestamp 5:30:25)

The Second Mrs. Hockaday by Susan Rivers

The Second Mrs. Hockaday is an epistolary novel told through letters and court documents. In it, Placidia is a young bride of a Confederate officer during the Civil War. When her husband returns from his time fighting and as a prisoner of war, he hears a rumor that Placidia had given birth to a baby and it had died while he was gone. What happened to her and what will happen to their marriage?

This book is based on true events that took place. I have very mixed feelings about this whole book.

On one hand, it's hard to read about a spoiled white southern lady relying entirely on black slave labor to survive, but still never truly acknowledges the inhumanity of slavery. On the other hand, it's a gripping mystery. I was drawn in almost immediately and I wanted answers and even as some answers rolled out slowly, there was still so much ambiguity that I was very satisfied with it as a mystery. 

This book won't be for everybody. There are descriptions of abuse, sexual and otherwise, animal abuse, and child abuse. There are descriptions about some of the degradations associated with slavery, including scenes of families being separated. Since it is told from the perspective of a Confederate sympathizer, it's awful blasé about some of the atrocities of the American Civil War. 

But it is an interesting case and situation. I was really riveting by the storytelling. I was fascinated by the old-timey rumor mill and I enjoyed the mystery aspect of the novel. I imagine I'll be thinking about this story for quite some time because something about it just struck the right chord with me.  

4.5/5 stars

Lines of note (I read this on my Kindle and the page numbers aren't synced, so I gave the Kindle locations):

Women like to think the worst of women more admired than they... (location 96)

I think this is a harsh reality. We do always compare ourselves to others and it's hard when you don't come out on top. Sometimes it's easier to criticize than admire.

Seeing how easily I can be physically overpowered has sapped a great deal of my fighting spirit. (location 1681)

The trauma of abuse has long-lasting consequences.

He showed me what a fine line divides love from misery. Sometimes, in fact, there's no line at all. (location 2676)

It's sad. One of my friends just closed on her divorce and she sways from emotion to emotion with regard to her former partner. 

Things I looked up:

Delaine (location 122, among others) - A kind of mixed cloth with cotton warp and wool in the weft. Originally a high quality women's wear dress material.

Pignut trees (location 355, among others) - A type of hickory tree.

Judas tree (location 359) - Cercis siliquastrum, commonly known as the Judas tree, is a small deciduous tree from Southern Europe and Western Asia which is noted for its prolific display of deep pink flowers in the spring.  

Jeremiad (location 1857) -  A long, mournful complaint or lamentation; a list of woes

Pertinacious (location 2579) - Holding firmly to an opinion or course of action

Syllabub (location 2723) - A sweet dish from Cornish cuisine, made by curdling sweet cream or milk with an acid like wine or cider.

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent is based on the true story of Agnes Magnusdottir, the last woman to be put to death in Iceland. The facts of the real life case are murky, involving a lot of young people switching sexual partners in a jealous haze in remote parts of Iceland. There's lots in here involving differences in power, gender, and social status. There's also a lot of bleakness - in setting and in tone. There's no joy, no happiness, and very little satisfaction except for the day to day business of living.  The vivid descriptions of the forbidding Icelandic shore leave you feeling nothing less than despair and hopelessness.  The writing is haunting and gloomy.

Described as a "speculative biography," Kent tries to undo Magnusdottir's reputation as an evil witch that has followed her since her death. This novel reimagines the situation that led to the murder for which Magnusdottir was eventually executed to be a much more sympathetic telling in which she technically did kill one of the men she was accused of killing, but as a mercy killing.  However, you don't get that payoff until the very end of the novel. In the meantime, you are in Magnusdottir's head, thinking her thoughts and feeling her feelings.

As a work of historical fiction, it's seamless. The author weaves in bits of backstory and true facts about Iceland without that forced feeling that sometimes happens when authors have done too much research and really want you to know exactly how many eyelets (or are they grommets?) would be found on footwear in the Victorian period. As a work of prose, it's delicious. You feel like you're there - hearing the coughing of a dying woman, watching Magnusdottir sway with the rhythm of cutting the hay, and smelling the smoke in the kitchen as they render sheep. 

I didn't know this was based on a true story when I sat down to read it, but I couldn't help but Google the trial when I was finished. Kent made me want to learn more.  She did it deftly and beautifully and I guess I couldn't ask for anything more from a novel. A beautiful novel.  If you get a chance to read this one, you should definitely do so.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

Every section break of this novel comes with a square from a patchwork quilt. There's a lot of talk of quilting patterns in this book as Grace Marks, our main character, slowly becomes revealed to us in bits and pieces, and we have to stitch those small sections of information together. I'm not going to say this framing narrative was a bit on the nose because it did take me a few sections to figure out what was going on, but lo! I caught the symbolism, so it wasn't NOT obvious, if you know what I mean.

Marks has been accused of murder. Did she do it? Did she not? We hear her side of things, as told to a doctor specializing in mental illness. We hear the side of doctors who think she totally did it. We get bits and pieces of her supposed confession.  And this mystery is unfolding in 1843 Canada, so we get all kinds of talk about the trouble in the States (vague hints of the soon to come Civil War), fashions, economic classes changing power and import, and just all sorts of fun historical details, like what clothing was being worn and what modes of transport were being used. We read about the subtle changes happening in relationships between men and women, including brutal scenes of rape and abortion. There's just so much intricate specificity in Atwood's writing that you could just wallow forever in the setting, but there's also so much character and plot happening that you can't wallow there.

This is based on a true story and Atwood connects bits of narrative from poetry, newspaper articles, and other writings on the Marks case to set the scene and then creates her own fictionalized version of what really happened to fill in the details. I guess her explanation makes as much sense as any other explanation, although Occam's razor tells us that the simplest explanation (she helped her accomplice murder two people) might make more sense.

Anyway, it's not a definitive accounting of anything, but it definitely is great writing.  If you haven't given this one a chance, do it. The writing itself is luminous. 

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick

I grew up in Michigan and have devoured just about every book that has been published on the Big Blow, a huge storm that blew over the Great Lakes in 1913 and destroyed more than a dozen ships and killed hundreds of people. I've read about the Christmas Tree Ship, the tipping over of the Eastland (which tipped over while tied to the dock and still killed more than 800 people!  - forget the Titanic, the Eastland is the real Hollywood story!), and I've poured over Edmund Fitzgerald lyrics and books. Generally speaking, I like my maritime disasters to be focused on the Great Lakes, but I like a good book about what happens on a boat,

(Sidenote: I feel a bit like June Diane Raphael on the hilarious podcast How Did This Get Made? in the episode on "Con Air" in which she noted that she likes movies that take place on planes because the stakes are so much higher.  It was hilarious when she said it, but not so much when I type it out.)

especially when what happens on a boat shows me a side of life I have never considered to be even the remotest part of my own life.  It doesn't necessarily HAVE to be about a disaster, but usually it is.

Anyway, Philbrick's well-researched book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex fits my interests really closely and I can't believe I hadn't heard of it (particularly in light of the fact that it was the basis of  2015 Ron Howard movie) until quite recently. I should have counted the number of times I said "CRAZY" as I read this book because I said it A LOT.

Back in the late 1700 and early 1800s, Nantucket was the world's center for whaling. Whales were prized for the oil that they could provide for energy.  Nantucketers had generational experience building ships and piloting them through the Pacific to harvest sperm whales. This book spins the tale of woe of the whaler Essex that set sail from Nantucket with 21 men on board in 1819. The Essex was attacked by a sperm whale, which was unheard of because sperm whale were relatively peaceful animals, and the ship sank, leaving the 20 men left (one man had deserted while at port earlier in the journey) in three whaleboats, which were the boats attached to the whaler that the crew would use to get close to whales to kill them. By the end of the ordeal, which took more than three months after the sinking of the Essex, the men had suffered from dehydration, starvation, and resorted to eating the bodies of their dead crewmates.  There were eventually eight survivors.

This book weaves together a history of Nantucket with narratives written down by two  of the survivors (first mate Owen Chase and cabin boy Thomas Nickerson) to tell this grueling tale of tragedy. In the section on the aftermath, Philbrick paints a startling picture of how the survivors were never really able to fully recover from their experiences and how it followed them around, both physically and emotionally, for the rest of their lives.

And Philbrick does all of this so well. From talking about how the wives on Nantucket were left alone for years on end while their men were out at sea, controlling households, finances, and their own sexual pleasure to discussing how rank the deck of the Essex must have been with the smell of whale carcasses, hogs and tortoises running loose on the deck, tar, and the smell of the men themselves, this book was absolutely riveting. I don't usually talk about non-fiction in such glowing terms, but I just had such a magically transporting time while reading it. 

This is the story that Melville used as inspiration for Moby Dick and it kind of made me want to read it, although I've heard the endless descriptions of whaling are tough to get through.

Regardless, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex was an excellent, excellent read.  If you're into shipping and sailing stories, give this one a shot. It won't disappoint!