When Winter Comes
By: V. A. Shannon / Narrated By: Susannah Jones
Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
Oh gosh… AnNOYing from beginning to end…
But of COURSE I’ve always been fascinated by the Donner Party… Intrepid pioneers who made a fatefully poooor decision; discord and fraying nerves; death death death; and dude! there’s cannibalism at the end there! What do you NOT find compelling in all that, for cripes sake!
Yeh yeh yeh; I’ve not been known for going on Teens/Young Adult fiction lightly as I have a tendency of getting all short-tempered with the breed’s hyper-sensitivities and total angst-ridden sensibilities. One would think that I’d remember m’ own days as a moody teen, or that working with teens for approximately 20+ years would have me a trifle more sympathetic.
Oh gosh, NOT when listening to something as FRAUGHT as When Winter Comes, author V.A. Shannon’s attempt to rescue villain of the whole Donner Incident, Lewis Keseberg, from History’s Dung Heap.
Our “heroine” is never named, but she’s kinda sorta known at the outset as Jacob Klein’s wife. This is maaaany years after her experiences with the Donner Party. Kind and patient (And apparently uninterested) husband Jacob has given her a journal juuuuust as one of the heroes of the notorious party has kicked the bucket. Egad, our heroine cries, he was aTROcious, and soon she’s scribbling madly away, writing all her memories down, never to show anyone but just so’s she can exorcise a few demons and set the record straight in her own mind.
The story goes back and forth between the 15-year old girl she was and who and how her life is some 13-odd-years later, now in California. As a teen, she comes from a hardscrabble existence, just one of oodles of children of a slatternly and abused mother, and a disreputable drunkard of a father. She’s uneducated, filthy, and when her Pa shoves her into a shed to start her work bringing some money in for his drinking by servicing disgusting men, this scrappy little Unnamed thing fights off the advances, and she… uhm, accidentally kills the creep. It’s into the dead man’s pockets she goes, and with a few dollars she finds, she’s off and running.
With nowhere to go. -But- she finds a huuuuge gathering of wagons and pioneers getting ready to set off for the riches and unknowns of California. She tries to get SOMEone to take her up, but the only family to do so are the Kesebergs. The wife is very sick as she’s verrrry pregnant, so she needs some help with chores and with looking after little daughter Ada.
From the get-go, Unnamed is kinda sorta smitten by patriarch Lewis Keseberg, he of the bright blue eyes and the sympathetic and lingering gaze.
I KNOW. Whazzis? A looming love-interest with Future Cannibal Extraordinaire?! Yessss, V.A. Shannon DOES go there.
I had to hit Google and Wikipedia, like, a gazillion (And six!) times to see how much is verifiable, and how much is author’s machinations.
Verifiable: Every character in the Donner Party. Also, incidents that occurred along the way, such as accidental shootings, witnessed murders, the abandonment of a little old man in the desert.
Author’s crafting/conceit: Shannon plainly and specifically states that she used her “lawyer’s mind” to sift through facts to portray Keseberg as somewhat innocent, that he was a good guy, that he was tarred with much too big a brush. Indeed, she has Mr. Keseberg as good and kind, and his shaking-like-crazy his wife was because: She was a hysterical and gossipy wench who deserved it.
Boooo!
As a matter of fact, in order to make him an agreeable character, she makes Unnamed an enTIREly disagreeable one. Unnamed has to watch Mr. and Mrs. Keseberg, indeed ALL of the party, like a hawk, judging all and sundry and finding each and every person sorely lacking. Excuse me, but that gets gosh-danged anNOYing when it’s the entirety of the book, when it’s the whole of Unnamed’s personality, the summation of her character (Or GROSS lack thereof).
None of the individuals is worthy of sympathy, and they make the decision to split off from the main body of the caravan for the most selfish and petty of reasons. Now, I don’t doubt, given what’s written about them, that that indeed was the case, especially as they soon separated into factions, turned on each other, squabbled and bickered left and right, and snubbed the starving and dying. Shannon at least gets THAT right.
But Keseberg as a man who patiently bore the weight of a snide and prattling and tale-telling boor of a wife, who patiently offered sage advice at just the right time only to have it spurned by snobs, who heartily hopped into bed with a 15-year old kid the minute his wife and daughter were rescued. Yikes! That does NOT make me feel Shannon has redeemed his name, saved him from the pressing weight of history. Just kinda grosses me out.
None of this is helped by choice of Susannah Jones as narrator. She quite simply has farrrrr too modern a voice for folksy dialogue. And she has farrrrr too genteel a voice for our Unnamed young scalawag who’s s’posed to be all dirty and scrappy. She’s also farrrrr too energetic for the parts where the party is just so beaten down by bad runs of luck; she’s also farrrr too pert and peppy when Unnamed and Keseberg shack up then chow down on a liver here, an arm or a leg there. And she’s soooo jaunty when Unnamed describes the delicacy of brain-scarfing. Nope, I’m sure she’s a capable narrator, for SOME things, just noooot this particular tale.
You wanna get into the Donner Party as entertainment? Avoid this like the plague. Instead hit Lewis Keseberg on Wikipedia (Free!). THAT’S to die for! The part where you just hear him telling two guys: No, no, no! I didn’t eat your kid, but yours? Oops, I kinda sorta did eat yours…
To DIE FOR! I’m tellin’ ya!
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