It was interesting reading the hardships people probably took trying to get to a new land and a new life. I have read stories like this before. I don't know if I could do what they did. The author did a nice job. ( )

Impatient with Desire" started out with great promise and my rapt interest, but by about halfway through I was ready for an escape hatch. The "flashback" tactic used throughout this book became tiresome, particularly in the middle, where these sequences became too frequent and disjointed. There wasn't much flow between the daily diary entries and flashbacks from the trail before the Donner party became encamped in the mountains, making the narrative less interesting as the book progressed. I honestly wanted the book to end. Perhaps Burton wanted the reader to feel, as the Donner party first felt, flush with adventure and interest (and fairly riveting writing), but at a middling point I really wanted the story to end.

Sidenote:
The author's note was also a bit curious, at times feeling more like explanation and apology rather than insightful or interesting. I cannot fathom why Burton altered which Donner child received a "special" chair or was given a oxen-hide doll. Were the Donner children fully formed characters, it might have a made a difference. ( )

Wagons, ho! It’s 1846, and the East is awash in California fever. Tamsen Donner, her husband George and their five daughters form a wagon train with a number of other families, intent on heading west from Illinois. Disastrously, nearly everything that could go wrong does, and coupled with a handful of unwise decisions, the entire party of more than eighty people -- most under the age of 18 -- find themselves stranded without provisions in the Sierra Nevada mountains for the winter. Tamsen narrates their plight, as well as flashbacks to earlier events in her life, through her journal entries.

The Donner Party. I’d heard of it, knew that it was a horrific event in pioneer history, but wasn’t really familiar with the details. This is an intriguing read, though the experience is clouded by a sense of foreboding -- you know it is not going to end well. I was inspired afterward to learn more about the Donner expedition -- what was documented, and what was imagined by the author? Although events toward the end become painful to read, I recommend it to fans of historical fiction. The book is laden with an unfortunate title evocative of a steamy romance, so it could easily be missed by its potential audience. ( )

Elegant book and written so well that I had no idea until the end that it was a fabricated journal of Tamsen Donners. ( )

I would not normally have chosen Impatient with Desire as a read. The cover is a bit prairie romance novel and the subject, the imagined journal of the wife of the leader of the Donner party, doesn't sound all that appetizing. I was invited to review this book by Rare Bird Lit and I am so very glad, otherwise I would've missed a great book.

Impatient with Desire is lots of things. It's epistolary. It's riveting. It's filled with dread and wonder and regret. It's a beautifully written impressionistic sort of novel that isn't really concerned about timelines or an A to Z path to telling its stories. Much like a real journal it is memories and thoughts and what if's.

Ms. Burton manages to instill a vague sense of dread throughout the book. Part of this is that we all know the end, but part of it is the way Ms. Burton drops facts and skitters about the reality forcing the reader to fill in the blanks. This book truly grabbed me within the first few pages and the list of Donner Party members - the number of children ruffled the hairs on the back of my neck. An unforgettable moment in reading so simply presented - this is the essence of this book and I loved it. ( )