Band of Angels

By Julia Gregson
Touchstone

It might be said that at heart, Band of Angels is a love story. But the course of love between Catherine Carreg and her childhood friend Deio is a convoluted, meandering one. Catherine and Deio grew up riding horses together in Wales in the 1850s. But when Catherine matures, her family puts a stop to her adventures with Deio, seeing it as improper for a young lady. After her mother dies in childbirth, Catherine feels lost and isolated. She wants to go out into the world and study medicine so she can help save lives, as a way to redeem a personal failure that she couldn't save her own mother.

Catherine escapes Wales with the help of Deio, who is a cattle driver. She dresses as a man and goes to London with him on a drive. Upon reaching London, Deio seems to want Catherine to stay with him, but she rejects him outright, refusing to see him after their furtive journey together. Catherine's determination to become a nurse or doctor is rewarded when she is accepted into Florence Nightingale's school for nurses. When Nightingale abruptly leaves for the Crimean war, Catherine begs to go with her.

In the meantime, Deio realizes the railroad will soon make his job as a cattle driver obsolete. Looking for other ways to make a living, he decides to sell horses to the Allied forces in the Crimea. He takes a number of his horses to Balaklava, knowing that Catherine is somewhere near there, and hoping he will find her somehow.

Catherine and Nightingale's other nurses end up in Scutari, far from the front, where thousands of wounded and ill soldiers are hospitalized. Here, they live in squalor, and food is a luxury. Soldiers die of typhus and other diseases more often than they die of wounds suffered on the battlefield. This is the most fascinating part of the story, but it takes more than half the book to get us to this point.

Gregson's research is strong, and she succeeds in making Wales, and the cattle drive to London, come alive for the reader. But there could have been much more about Nightingale and the procedures she used in the hospital in Scutari to offer the reader historical insight. Nightingale is a filmy character here, difficult to relate to, and the war itself seems very distant as well.

It is true that Nightingale has been characterized as standoffish in reality, but still, she had the passion to take her across the world and into hospitals where no women had been allowed before. We don't see much of that drive here. Catherine's motivation for going to the Crimea needed further development, as well. In addition, it seems a bit of a leap when Catherine starts longing for Deio after she so assuredly rejected him. The love story seems almost superfluous at times.

In spite of some plot and character flaws, the book, overall, does succeed in drawing the reader into a brutal world that we want to know more about. This is one of those imperfect books that keeps you reading, looking forward to more like this: “Blood was the hardest thing of all to wash out; all of them wore it like a permanent stain. They spent most of their time on the wards trying to take it from their tangled hair and old bandages, from faces and dolls and pictures and handkerchiefs; strange what the men carried closest to their hearts.”

Review by Natasha Bauman

The King’s Mistress

By Emma Campion
Crown Publishers

I’ve always had a special affinity for historical fiction, more specifically, historical fiction about the English courts of medieval times. As someone who has never excelled in the complex maneuverings of office politics, I find the level of intrigue and skulduggery that existed then alternately fascinating and mind boggling. The stakes were pretty high; if you found yourself on the wrong side of history, you could end up imprisoned in the tower of London, or worse still, with your head dangling on a pike for all to see.

Until I signed on to review The King’s Mistress for the virtual book tour, I was unaware that Alice Perrers is one of the most despised villains in British history. Perrers has been reviled by her peers and scholars alike—characterized as a woman who used her beauty, sensuality, and cunning to take advantage of an aging king for her own material and political gain. Described as the world’s leading authority on Alice Perrers, Compton has set about revealing the truth of the matter with a fascinating text that both rehabilitates and humanizes her.

It’s no secret that the combination of intelligence, erotic allure, and beauty is a dangerous mix for women, and throughout history these women have both fascinated and repelled us as far back as Eve. Because this novel falls in the genre of historical fiction, Campion admits in her author’s notes to taking some liberties with the facts to breathe new life into Perrer’s story, but much of this voluminous novel comes from her extensive research on Perrer’s life and times.

When we first meet Alice, she is fourteen, and her beauty is already in full bloom. Her mother, an aging and discontented beauty, seems to view Alice as competition, yet resents her father’s decision to betroth Alice to a charismatic, wealthy merchant twenty years her senior. Alice fears leaving the comfort and safety of her family, but is excited to embark on this new chapter in her life. What she doesn’t realize is that her husband is withholding secrets that she will only discover once she is enmeshed in her own web of intrigue.

Suffice it to say, Compton’s sympathetic rendering of Perrer’s story presents her as a woman who finds herself in circumstances beyond her control, and forced to use her attributes to survive in a world where a person who appears to be your ally one day could turn out to be your enemy the next. Emma Campion has reimagined history into “herstory” in this beautifully written, riveting novel.

Review by Gita Tewari

Sacred Hearts

By Sarah Dunant
Random House

Sarah Dunant's first historical novel, The Birth of Venus, captured my attention right away with one of the best openings I've ever read. I picked up Sacred Hearts hoping for something equally brilliant. While I enjoyed the book, it is not one that will make your heart race; instead, you should immerse yourself in it, let it surround you so you are living with the nuns, at their pace. Enjoy the opportunity to sink into another life and another time.

Set in Florence in 1570, Sacred Hearts takes place within the walls of a convent. Young Serafina has been banished there by her family, to keep her from the man she loves. She is furious, and determined to escape.

Suora (Sister) Zuana is the convent's dispensary mistress, their only healer. She sees in Serafina more than just an unwilling novice. Though she carries out her duties (novices who wail through the night are sedated), Zuana's own troubling thoughts are rekindled. An educated woman with no dowry, she had no choice but to enter the convent. Her active mind clashes with the philosophy of convent life, and so she has had to dampen many of her more critical instincts.

Serafina arrives at a time when change is rocking the convent, the city, and the continent. There are many calling for stricter rules in these houses built for women and maintained by them. Abbess Madonna Chiara, Zuana's old friend, walks a fine line between hobbling her flock and appeasing the more radical members like Suora Umiliana, who believes they have a saint living among them.

All this excitement is tempered by the sedate atmosphere of convent life. Dunant has done an excellent job of crafting their world apart from the world. The convent is an insular place, where peace is maintained through quiet and routine. The disorder Serafina brings sends ripples through the convent, creating opportunities for some, and trapping others. The historical context of Florence in the early 1570s plays a large role in how the convent will, ultimately, change.

As for Serafina, her focus is solely on the man she loves. Her feverish desire turns to despair when their plans fall through, and the fever begins to consume her. Umiliana urges her on—deprivation will bring her closer to God, she insists, against Zuana's medical opinion.

The novel is a tapestry depicting the fight for balance and supremacy, woven with the threads of God, science, authority, family, love, and community.

Sacred Hearts makes it possible to both love and hate the convent system. Women enter for many reasons—poverty, tradition, disfigurement or disability, lack of a husband, to escape a bad husband, or even the opportunity for a different kind of freedom. Had Zuana married, she would be a wife and mother with no time to pursue her studies. Madonna Chiara has become a successful leader and politician, dealing with Church officials and the wealthy and powerful families of the nuns. The convent frees them of society's usual demands, creating a space for them to grow in other ways.

At the same time, there is much to rail against. Many of these women have been victims of society. Many, like Serafina, are not given a choice about entering the convent. Many fear the boredom—what is there to do for the rest of your life, trapped behind the walls? Add the usual feminist complains about religion (Chaiara is Abbess, but only a male priest can conduct services and give them the Eucharist.) and it sounds unbearable.

Dunant addresses this complaints in subtle ways, adhering more closely to the matters that concerned the women of the time. My fellow atheists may always be uncomfortable with topics like these, but Sacred Hearts affords us all a rare glimpse into the circumstances of these women.

Review by Richenda Gould

Captive Queen: A Novel of Eleanor of Aquitaine

By Alison Weir
Ballantine Books

Alison Weir is first a historian, and it shows in Captive Queen. She studied Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1970s and 1990s and realized one day that “the nature of medieval biography, particularly of women, is the piecing together of fragments of information and making sense of them. It can be a frustrating task, as there are often gaps that you know you can never fill.”

Captive Queen explores Eleanor’s life from just before her marriage to Henry FitzEmpress (later Henry II, King of England) until just after Henry’s death in 1189. There is also an epilogue that covers her death in 1204. At the beginning, there’s a map of lower England and Aquitaine, Normandy, Brittany, and France, which are all parts of present-day France. Also included is a helpful flowchart of Eleanor and Henry’s genealogy, which I referred to numerous times when I was trying to remember minor characters.

The novel itself is split into five parts, each representing a stage in Eleanor’s life and marriage to Henry. The first part is a rosy depiction of Eleanor’s early life with Henry. At the time of their wedding, he was eighteen and she was twenty-nine and already had two daughters. They were married just two months after the annulment of her marriage to the King of France, Louis VII. Eleanor’s marriage to King Henry was tumultuous: she fought with Henry often about his rule of her lands. At the same time, however, it was steamy; it wasn’t even twenty pages in before the first bedroom scene occurs. Still, it’s clear she wanted a partnership of equals, not a man to rule over her as husband and lord, which was the norm at the time, especially for women in royalty.

The following four parts accentuate her desire to be included in affairs of state, rule her lands equitably, and be treated as more than “the wife of King Henry and mother of his children.” The second part covers her apparent rivalry with Thomas Becket. In the third part, Weir writes about Eleanor and Henry’s sons: Young Henry, Richard (who would become Richard the Lionheart), Geoffrey, and John (later to become King John, best known for signing the Magna Carta and for being a primary antagonist in most Robin Hood legends).

After encouraging her sons to rebel (unsuccessfully) against their father, Henry placed Eleanor under house arrest for more than fifteen years, most notably in Sarum, Wiltshire (the earliest settlement of present-day Salisbury, England). There, she received very little news from outside the confines of her imprisonment but was finally freed upon Henry’s death in 1189. In the novel, she says to her gaoler, “Master Berneval, I command you, in the name of King Richard, to set me at liberty at once.” And he does.

Two things irked me about Captive Queen, and neither are the author’s fault. The first is Henry’s repeated insistence (and everyone else’s assumption) that women are meant to be child-bearers and nothing more. Eleanor herself even notes that she is most proud of her daughters when they produce children—hopefully sons—for their husbands. The second is that Eleanor’s life revolves around the men in it, no matter how much she wants to rule her lands herself or how intelligent and magnanimous she is in acting as Henry’s regent. The first thing is the unfortunate sexist reality Eleanor had to deal with during her lifetime. The second is related; Weir’s frustration at being able to find only a very few fragments of Eleanor’s life basically forced her to study the men surrounding Eleanor and often make conjectures about her based on what was written about them.

It’s clear in reading that Alison Weir did a lot of research before penning Captive Queen as a fiction. After all, she writes, “What is the point of a historical novel... based on a real person if the author does not take pains to make it authentic as possible?” For fans of medieval Europe, this book is a must read. Just beware that the author made it as authentic as possible, right down to the sexism of the time period.

Review by Viannah Duncan

The Time of Terror

By Seth Hunter
McBooks Press

In The Time of Terror, Seth Hunter introduces us to a new naval hero in the style of C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower. Nathan Peake is a commander in the British Navy who spends his days chasing smugglers along the English coastline. This is not really Nathan’s idea of fun and he longs to have some real adventures. He gets his chance in the year 1793 when, with England and France at war, he is asked to run the blockade in the English Channel and deliver some important documents to the American minister in Paris. Unknown to Nathan, however, his ship is carrying a cargo of counterfeit banknotes – putting his life in serious danger!

Although it’s not necessary to be an expert on French history to understand this story, you will get more out of it if you have some prior knowledge of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. So if names such as Georges Danton and Robespierre mean nothing to you, it might be a good idea to do some research before beginning the book.

Readers who enjoy historical fiction novels that focus on real historical figures will be pleased to know that throughout the pages of The Time of Terror you’ll meet the author and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, the American agent (and Mary’s lover) Gilbert Imlay, the revolutionary writer Thomas Paine and many more—so many, in fact, that I began to feel Hunter was just trying to drop as many famous names as possible into the story, regardless of whether they were necessary.

The sheer amount of historical detail in this novel was slightly overwhelming, though usually interesting. There were dinner parties with Camille Desmoulins and Lucile Duplessis, visits to the waxworks (including a brief appearance by the young Madame Tussaud) and vivid descriptions of the guillotine. However, other parts of the story that interested me were barely touched on. The romantic storyline, for example, is very weak, and I would also have liked to have seen more of Nathan’s American feminist mother who had the potential to be a fascinating character.

If you’re concerned that there’ll be a lot of unfamiliar nautical terms and difficult-to-understand naval battles you’ll be right to some extent, but the story can still be followed even if you find yourself confused or bored by the seafaring aspects. The sea battle scenes, although very well written, actually contribute very little to the plot and the book would have worked better as a more conventional historical fiction novel in my opinion. However, there was probably too much land-based action to satisfy fans of nautical fiction so I think the book suffered from not really knowing what it wanted to be or what kind of reader it was aimed at.

This book is the first in a trilogy. In the second Nathan Peake book, The Tide of War, the action moves to the Caribbean and in the third, The Price of Glory, Nathan will meet Napoleon Bonaparte. Although I did find this book entertaining and interesting, I’m undecided as to whether I want to invest the time in following Nathan’s story to its conclusion.

Review by Helen Skinner

Cross-posted at She Reads Novels

Lady of the Butterflies

By Fiona Mountain
G.P. Putnam’s Sons

One reason I gravitate towards historical fiction is that I enjoy discovering individuals in history whom I normally wouldn’t learn about on my own. Eleanor Glanville was a seventeenth century English entomologist from Somerset. Her specialty was butterflies and some of her collections still live in the Natural History Museum today. Though Glanville’s work is several centuries old, Fiona Mountain brings Glanville’s contributions and character to life in Lady of the Butterflies.

As a child, Glanville grew up under the strict guidance of her Puritan father who forbade her to participate in Christmas or other Catholic celebrations. At the same time, this father also encouraged her to embrace and understand her environment at Tickenham Court, which was located in the middle of a moor. Eleanor’s passionate interest in insects, specifically butterflies, started at a young age but was seen as abnormal behavior among her neighbors and servants. In the late seventeenth century, education for women was not encouraged or looked upon kindly.

In her early twenties, Eleanor married Edmund Ashfield whom she loved dearly, and bore him two children. However, she had a rather unhealthy desire and longing for his closest friend, Richard Glanville, who was a dashing but extremely moody young man. There are sections of the book that are reminiscent of a romance novel, especially in the descriptions of Eleanor and Richard’s interactions. Fiona Mountain wants the reader to know that this was a fiercely passionate woman whether it be toward the men she loved, her butterflies, or her children.

What I found the most interesting about Glanville was her love of nature and learning and her ability to win the respect and admiration of male scientists, young and old. Many naturalists of that time were interested in her quest to understand the metamorphism of the butterfly and were quick to support her discoveries.

While reading this book, there was always a touch of apprehension. Glanville was sometimes on the edge of danger because many of her neighbors, servants, and acquaintances accused her of being insane. After all, what self-respecting woman would run chasing butterflies with her hair down when she had responsibilities at home? This was also during the period of the witch hunts, in which a woman caught interacting with nature might likely be accused of cavorting with the devil.

Lady of the Butterflies was an illuminating read about a fascinating woman. The Glanville Fritillary butterfly was named after Glanville, and I must admit that I have developed a renewed interest in those painted winged beauties.

Review by Su Lin Mangan

Eleanor the Queen: A Novel of Eleanor of Aquitaine

By Norah Lofts
Touchstone

I have to say... I feel a little duped. There is nothing in the book's presentation to suggest that Eleanor the Queen is a reprint of a 1950s novel by Norah Lofts. Apparently Lofts was a prolific and best-selling author known for her "authentic use of period detail." I hadn’t heard of her, but I don’t follow the historical novel market, I just read them. I did not, however, finish reading this. I forced myself to finish Part One of four, but I just could not go on.

Eleanor of Aquitaine was a remarkable woman. She was born in approximately 1122, and became the sole heir to her father’s vast property when he died in 1137. To protect her and her land, she was married to Prince Louis VII of France, who soon became king. When he rode to the Crusades, Eleanor went with him, bringing a coterie of other women with her. She was admired and compared to the Amazons. But the marriage became strained and ultimately ended. (And that’s just Part One—Eleanor went on to do a lot.)

Research tells me that Eleanor was intelligent, strategic, and ambitious. Norah Lofts tells me that Eleanor sat around waiting for things to change, twiddling her thumbs. She tells me Eleanor is intelligent, but somehow this "politically savvy" young woman didn’t know how big her land was until her uncle showed her on a map. Like in so much mediocre fiction, the writer makes statements about the character, setting her up to be admired, only to have the character's actions completely undermine those statements.

People always argue about historical fiction’s (lack of) accuracy. A scenario set in the tenth century is patchy enough that it’s possible to build an excellent story while sticking to the few known facts. Either Lofts did not have good information, or she ignored the facts completely.

Worst of all, the book is incredibly poorly written. The dialogue is hackneyed, the characters are just names and voices, downright boring passages drag on forever, and interesting events aren’t developed. The style is reminiscent of books written between 1700 and 1900, but it rings false, and is just an irritant. The narrative is aware of its own grandeur, wallowing in description without letting people or their actions speak for themselves.

I was so astounded by how poorly written Eleanor the Queen is that I began doing more research into the book and its writer. It was confirmed that Norah Lofts still has a devoted fan base. It was also confirmed that her facts are just wrong, totally contradicting that line on the back cover about her use of period detail. When I discovered that Lofts was born in 1904, I forced myself to rein in a bit. Older books do have a different style. That style doesn’t always appeal to modern readers, including me. But then I saw that Eleanor the Queen was written in the 1950s. It ain’t that old.

Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind in 1936 and it blew my socks off; there’s no excuse for Norah Lofts.

This book would never make it out of a writing workshop.

Review by Richenda Gould

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

By Maryse Condé
University of Virginia Press

This fascinating novel, which won France's Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme, offers readers a vivid re-imagining of the life of a historical figure mentioned only briefly in the transcripts of the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials: a slave woman of Caribbean origins, accused of practicing voodoo. Angela Davis, in her foreword to the current edition, asserts the importance of “the retelling of a history that is as much mine as it is hers,” a story of great significance to Black women who are “Tituba's cultural kin.” The first person narrative gives Tituba an opportunity to recount her life as she sees it, to overcome the silence imposed on her by official histories of the period. Maryse Condé, herself born in Guadeloupe, begins by evoking the beauties and horrors of the West Indies—of Barbados in particular—where Tituba is born to an Ashanti woman “as lithe and purple as the sugarcane flower,” who had been raped by a British sailor. Little Tituba flourishes at first in her island home, but her mother comes into conflict with their master and is hanged for striking a white man. At the age of seven, Tituba is taken in by old Mama Yaya and raised in the traditional healing ways inherited from African ancestors. The growing girl learns to respect everything in nature, to make the proper prayers and sacrifices, to devise “potions whose powers I strengthened with incantations,” and to communicate with the spirits, including her deceased mother.

The idyll in the wilderness ends abruptly when the adolescent Tituba falls in love with a merry rascal, a slave named John Indian. She soon moves to the capital, Bridgetown to be with him. John Indian jokingly calls her a witch, because of her special magical gifts, but others suspect her of commerce with the devil even though, as she protests, “Before setting foot inside this house I didn't know who Satan was!” In an interview published in the afterword to the present edition, Maryse Condé describes Tituba as “doing only good to her community” through her relations with “the invisible forces,” and therefore not a witch in the bad connotations of the term, but the bigoted people with whom she comes in contact—especially after she is sold along with John Indian to a Puritan minister, Samuel Parris—do not see her in a positive light.

One of the themes of the book is the unlikely (and, unfortunately, often temporary) alliances that can form between persons divided by race, class, or religion. When Parris moves with his household to Boston, a strong friendship develops between Tituba and Elizabeth Parris, the minister's wife, as well as with her child Betsey, It is one of the ironies of the novel that Tituba's efforts to amuse and aid the girls in her charge at Salem Village arouse the villagers' fears and turn them against her. The Caribbean folktales she tells about sorcerers and vampires titillate everyone and feed their fears of damnation and demonic possession. When Betsey tells her cousin Abigail about the secret magic rites Tituba has used to protect the frail little girl, the situation gets out of control. Condé locates the ultimate source of the hysteria that sweeps through the village as a combination of the repression of healthy sensual pleasures along with the accumulation of small-town jealousies and resentments among the populace, together with unacknowledged guilt at the mistreatment of Blacks and American Indians by the white settlers. The village girls accuse many local figures of magically tormenting them.

Arrested and interrogated in 1692, Tituba at first protests her innocence: she has done no wrong, has not hurt any of the afflicted children. Her husband John Indian advises her to play along with her accusers, to tell them what they want to hear. He even pretends to be possessed, himself. In a controversial sequence criticized by many reviewers, the novel's heroine encounters a character called Hester in prison, clearly based on the wholly fictional heroine of The Scarlet Letter. Certain historians have condemned this intrusion of Romantic literature into a historical novel, yet Condé in her interview defends it on two different grounds: a) that her work “is the opposite of a historical novel,” that her Tituba is an invented “female hero, ... a mock-epic character,” and b) that as a novelist, she felt “there was a link between Tituba and Nathaniel Hawthorne,” persons inhabiting the same region at times not too far apart for comparison. The conversation between the two prisoners gives Condé a chance to explore the social constraints on women and the difficult relations between men and women. Ann Armstrong Scarboro's afterword asserts that here Condé “parodies modern feminist discourse,” but it seems to me that Condé gets to play both sides against the middle in these passages by intermixing humorous and serious notes and leaving it up to the reader to decide how to interpret them.

While Tituba's testimony at trial is quoted from actual transcripts, the additional context Condé provides suggests that the accused woman is merely mouthing words that others are saying, going along with other people's superstitions. As a confessed witch she is sentenced to jail but escapes the death penalty. Thus she survives, while many of the people condemned for witchcraft are executed. The historical note to this edition of the novel states that in 1693 the slave Tituba was sold to pay her prison fees and the price of her chains. It is unclear what happened thereafter to the historical woman, but Condé chooses to have her Tituba purchased by Benjamin Cohen d'Azevedo, a Portuguese Jewish merchant whose wife had died. Benjamin and Tituba slowly become friends and eventually lovers. After a terrible house fire set by Puritan persecutors in which Benjamin's children are killed, he frees her and buys a ship passage back to Barbados for her. There she becomes involved with a group of maroons—wild Blacks who seem to be working towards freedom for the plantation slaves—but even there she finds betrayal and a revolt that fails. She is finally hanged by the British authorities. The epilogue finds the spirit of Tituba still active in the island, heroine of a popular song going about encouraging the slaves to fight for liberty.

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem is a work I highly recommend to people interested in African-American and Caribbean literature, colonialism and post-colonialism, post-modernism and feminism, as well as to any reader interested in a colorful adventure tale. The additional scholarly materials provided in this edition make this book helpful even to readers familiar with the original French text.

Review by Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring

Captivity

By Deborah Noyes
Unbridled Books

Captivity is a historical novel based on the true story of the Fox sisters, who claimed they could communicate with the dead. Able to convince a group of people of their abilities, they garnered a following that would grow to become a religious movement known as American Spiritualism, or simply Spiritualism. The three Fox sisters relied on raps to communicate with the dead, having the spirits count off the letters, words, and numbers they were trying to say.

Deborah Noyes uses the history of the Fox sisters and then builds on it with the story of Clara Gill. Clara has suffered the death of a loved one and while she is skeptical at the ability of the Fox sisters, she begins to embrace the possibility of reconnecting with the spirit of the love she lost. The novel switches back and forth between Clara’s narrative and that of the Fox sisters—particularly Maggie who, in the novel, works for some time at Clara’s house.

One of the things I liked best about this book is the fact the way each chapter shifts between the women’s points of view. I’m a big fan of nontraditional narratives because I feel it keeps the momentum going and keeps the reader interested. Even more to my liking, Clara’s story jumps a bit through time. In the first few Clara-centric chapters, for instance, you learn that she has suffered some sort of loss that has left her reclusive from even her father, the only family she has left. What you don’t immediately learn is how she got this way. As her narrative unfolds, the reader it taken back about ten years to explain her past, but it takes several chapters to get to the full story. People who prefer traditional narratives will likely get very frustrated that it takes so long to understand what’s going on.

Because communicating with spirits is already a seemingly fictional topic, it was hard to separate fiction from the alleged reality, and it certainly sparked some interest in me to learn more about the Fox sisters and Spiritualism. Within minutes of finishing the book, I was online, searching for Spiritualism and the history of the Fox sisters. From the little I could find out, it certainly seems that Noyes spent quite some time researching for this novel.

In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter what’s fact and what’s fiction. The novel is written in the third-person, but Noyes still describes what people are thinking and feeling enough for the reader to become invested in the characters. On top of that, she was able to pull me into the story and believe everything she’s presenting as complete truth. It’s rare that a novel can do that with as much ease as this one.

Review by frau sally benz

Impatient with Desire

By Gabrielle Burton
Voice

Impatient with Desire is the story of Tamsen Donner, now-legendary westward pioneer. Tamsen was forty-five when she set out on the California-Oregon Trail with her husband and five children in the spring of 1846. Stranded by early snows, Tamsen and the other Donner Party pioneers spent a harrowing four months in the Sierra Nevadas without supplies. Tamsen sent her daughters out with relief parties and stayed behind with her wounded husband; she died sometime in April 1847, leaving only her letters and a journal that was never recovered. Impatient with Desire is a recreation of that lost journal.

Burton’s meticulously researched account mingles her own prose with phrases from Tamsen’s extant letters, with engaging results. From her shelter in the Sierra Nevadas, Tamsen remembers her girlhood in Newburyport, her courtship and marriage with her second husband, the bustle of their preparations to move west, and the hardships of trail life. Burton captures the voice of this remarkable woman, a schoolteacher and botanist who traveled alone from Massachusetts to Illinois and left behind a spirited collection of letters to her sister Betsey. “In my lifetime people have sometimes wondered at my conduct, but they have never despised me,” Tamsen writes, thinking back over her travels. “And I shall never be despised.”

Tamsen’s independence does not go too far, however, in securing her voice on the trail. One of the most harrowing moments in Impatient with Desire is a campfire scene where the party’s men debate over whether or not to take the Hastings Cutoff, the ill-advised shortcut that ultimately left them stranded. Sitting beyond the circle of men with her journal on her lap, Tamsen records the fateful vote, convinced that no woman in the party would have agreed to the decision. Months later, searching for empty spaces in her filled journal, Tamsen muses, “You can write a whole book in the margins.” Tamsen’s marginalized pages remind us of marginalized voices: a “schoolteacher doing life and death sums,” Tamsen is at once a mother, wife, traveler, scribe, voteless companion.

Despite her exclusion from trail politics, Tamsen still maintains an equal companionship with her second husband George. The story of their marriage blends the objects and scenes of memory with the bleak mountain campsite. These vivid recollections—holidays and children’s birthdays, the decision to move West, the frenzy of preparations, and the excitement as the party sets out from Independence—bring Tamsen alive as a historical figure. Reminiscence finally yields to grim inventory as, in spare, elegant language, Tamsen records taking apart her family’s shelter, her botany collection, even her journal cover, for sustenance.

Burton’s Impatient with Desire is more evenly composed than her memoir about her cross-country journey in Tamsen’s tracks, Searching for Tamsen Donner. I began the book a bit skeptical about its valorization of the American frontier, and I kept reading because I wanted more Tamsen. Donner Party lore has often focused on the cannibalism of the pioneers (confirmed facts about the Donner Party’s struggles are notoriously scanty). Burton deftly negotiates this tale of outward struggle to bring us a story of inner survival as well. I read Impatient with Desire with a kind of grim fascination; Tamsen’s endurance and the powerful elegance of her narration stayed with me long after I finished the book.

Finely crafted and spellbinding in the calm pain of its heroine, Impatient with Desire is historical fiction at its best. Readers interested in women’s history, westward expansion, wilderness tales, and historical fiction will find much to ponder.

Review by Barbara Barrow