Impatient with Desire: The Lost Journal of Tamsen Donner

by Gabrielle Burton

Book Overview

A great adventure.A haunting tragedy."An enduring love." In the spring of 1846, Tamsen Donner, her husband, George, their five daughters, and eighty other pioneers headed to California in eager... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1401341667
• Release Date: March 2011
• Publisher: Voice
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.1" x 0.8" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

Gives Tamsen Donner a Voice

All American schoolchildren probably learn about the Donner Party. While not an incredibly significant event in American westward expansion, the story of the families emigrating to California who become trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains and struggle to survive -- some even resorting to cannibalism -- captures our imaginations as much today as it did when it happened. In Impatient with Desire -- an unfortunate title that evokes a lurid romance more than a serious work of historical fiction -- Burton attempts to give a voice to one of the people who perished in that ordeal: Tamsen Donner, wife of the expedition's leader, George Donner. The story is told in the form of Tamsen's imaginary diary entries and letters to her sister. This choice is a good one because it allows Tamsen to recollect important events from her past, shedding light on her character and breaking up what would otherwise be a bleak narrative of four months of misery and starvation. As Tamsen deteriorates, her journal entries become more disjointed and rambling, helping the reader experience her state of mind. The only problem with this narrative structure is that it is sometimes repetitive, and it can be difficult to keep track of when certain key events happened. Tamsen is a fascinating character, a woman ahead of her time. She is portrayed as an adventurer at heart who found a soulmate in her second husband George. She had a strong desire to experience the world and often chafed against the societal restrictions placed on women in her time. She also regarded her family's move westward as her chance to participate in history and help shape what her young country would become. She wholeheartedly believed in Manifest Destiny. This goes a long way toward explaining why she would bring her five young children along on such a treacherous journey. Unfortunately, the other characters outside the immediate Donner family aren't as well-drawn as Tamsen, and it is often difficul to keep them all straight, especially in this non-linear narrative. Still, the story is told in Tamsen's voice, and perhaps even she didn't know her fellow travelers very well. I was most interested in whether she felt she had made a mistake in heading West and putting her children through an unimaginable ordeal. While Tamsen does ruminate on some of the party's mistakes -- taking the disastrous shortcut that led to their being trapped, for one -- she never seems to regret her decisions. Up to the end, she manages to take pride in their adventure and her conviction that they are leading others west in a great mission to form a new land, despite their expedition's failures. I'm not certain I would have felt the same way, or that I would have chosen to stay behind with my husband instead of seeing my children to safety, but a great part of our fascination with this story is wondering why these people made the choices they did and imagining what we would have done in their place. Burton does a good job of bring

Impatient with Desire -- [...]s take!

A few weeks ago, the author of Impatient with Desire contacted me about reading, reviewing, and creating discussion questions for her new novel. Now I'll admit, when I read that the topic was the Donner Party, I hesitated -- a lot. I know very little about this unfortunate tragedy -- and really had no desire to learn more. However, the author explained the novel was written as a Tamsen Donner's journal and that it is a quick read. So, I decided, "why not?" While Impatient with Desire does address the events that led to cannibalism and other tragic acts, the heart and spirit of this novel is truly a romance. Through Tamsen's letters and fictional journal entries, we witness a marriage that is beautiful and a pleasure to witness. Tamsen's sacrifices for her children, and especially for her husband, are awe-inspiring and powerful. Gentle moments from their courtship were especially lovely, as evidenced in the following passage: While watching her soon-to-be-husband painstakingly build a stone wall... "He was in no hurry nor rush -- I would come to understand that he cared more about the building than the completion -- and my heart said, I will cast my lot with this calm, deliberative man who cares about the fit and rightness of things." On a another level, Desire is an adventure story -- reminding this reader of how courageous and, quite honestly, foolhardy those early settlers were. I did not realize that there were forty-three children -- many under the age of ten -- in the Donner's excursion. This was painful to read about since children have no voice. But I also appreciate that this complex country of ours owes adventurers a debt of gratitude. I've been fortunate to have visited all 50 states and can't imagine our country without the Rocky Mountains or the Badlands or the California coast. And I should follow Burton's lead in not judging the pioneers. She does an admirable job of not censuring the Donner Party -- allowing readers to form their own opinions and judgements about the events. Tamsen's voice is authentic and strong -- her focus is on the lives of her five children and husband and she is unapologetic, even when wracked with anger and doubt. I do think this novel would be a good choice for a book club -- the length and speed of the structure results in a fast-paced narrative that only takes a few hours to finish. In addition, the neutral tone allows readers to form their own opinions of the events -- and my discussion questions are available for free from the author's website to help facilitate discussion, too!

Lost and Impatiently hungry

Crafted from research, including 17 letters written by Tamsen Donner herself, Burton has created a fictional journal of Tamsen Donner and the Donner Party that is insightful and heart-wrenching. It is as if she has given the Donner Party a voice more than 150 years later, and that voice was one of hopes, dreams, fear, isolation, strength and, ultimately, courage. How the party came to end up trapped in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for the winter of 1846/1847 was really a complex mix of mistakes, mishaps, and foolhardiness, but many of the group made it through. Burton paints Tamsen Donner as a woman ahead of her time, educated, ambitious, strong, and, ultimately, a woman you would like to have known. The struggles that they went through are seemingly unimaginable, but //Impatient with Desire// makes them all real. What parent wouldn't die just a little inside, knowing that their child is starving and they can't do a thing about it? What role do the rules of society play when you and your family are freezing, starving, and trapped? Powerful questions and just as powerfully written, this novel kept me entranced. Reviewed by Gwen Stackler

Loved this interesting book

I read this is one day and then thought about it during the night. Mrs. Donner is so well drawn and the back and forth of the plot, shifting between the current horrible situation and their past lives, all keep you reading until the very end and wishing there were more. Good insight into the minds of the pioneers who adventured West..

The One to Read

I've spent the last few months reading books on the Donner Party, going back to a novel out of print for fifty years, so I can say with some confidence, If you read one book on the event, this is the one to read. For a strictly chronological account that puts you on the ground at Donner Lake, I still recommend The Mothers, by Vardis Fisher. But Gabrielle Burton has done something special with a hard topic. Impatient with Desire is the lost journal of Tamsen Donner. To understand, let's back up a bit. From this distance, one of the tragedies of the Donner story is the loss of Tamsen Donner's journal. Tamsen was the wife of the leader of the group, George Donner. She was an educated woman, a teacher and writer, and she kept a journal from the time they left Independence, Missouri, in April 1845 until some weeks before her death in the Sierras almost a year later. The journal, like most of the property of the doomed emigrants, was lost in the spring thaw after all were dead or saved. It is truly lost, not misplaced, mulched into the forest at Donner Lake. But what an opportunity it was, and it is an imagined classic of the Oregon/California Trail. Burton uses a deeply informed imagination to "retrieve" it, and her book beautifully recreates what might have been. She imagines the book as not just a diary but a memoir, which gives her the opportunity to tell the entire story in a series of flashbacks woven into an account of the four months the families spent trapped and starving an impassable hundred miles from Sacramento. Burton imagines that Tamsen began the journal at the lake, so the warp of the story is the daily trials of staying alive and keeping children alive. Woven into that cord are Tamsen's recollections of her childhood, her life in Illinois with George, and key events of the journey across the plains. This is a small, powerful book. Your disbelief will be suspended within a few pages as you listen to Tamsen's lucid, crisp voice. Burton spent most of her adult life preparing to write this book. Her personal memoir of that quest, Searching for Tamsen Donner, captures that quest evocatively. But Impatient with Desire is the payoff, a gripping, touching novel about a key moment of our history, not so much a cautionary tale (as Virginia Reed wrote succinctly to a cousin, "Never take no cutoffs.") as a record of an avalanche of disaster made from pebbles of circumstance.