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

5.0

This book is bleak. It goes into detail about the incredible suffering experienced by Sarah Graves and the rest of the Donner Party before, during and after the months they spent trapped in the Sierra Nevadas. It will leave you angry at the arrogance of the snake oil salesman who sent them on a dangerous road and heartbroken as you see the chain of bad decisions that got them stuck by the lake. At the same time, it's a really interesting look at life on the frontier and among emigrant communities just before the Gold Rush. It's mostly incredibly well written, too, and puts enough flesh on the bones of each person that you're really invested in what will happen to them.

I would say the epilogue is a weak spot, where the prose gets self-indulgent and overly flowery. Almost every paragraph follows the same structure, and I think the points made would be far more impactful if they were worked into the body of the narrative. Overall, though, this book is compulsive reading that left me thinking about Sarah Graves and the rest of the survivors for quite a while.