Answer Creek
A Novel
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4.5 • 33 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From the award-winning author of Eliza Waite comes a gripping tale of adventure and survival based on the true story of the ill-fated Donner Party on their 2,200-mile trek on the Oregon–California Trail from 1846 to ’47.
Nineteen-year-old Ada Weeks confronts danger and calamity along the hazard-filled journey to California. After a fateful decision that delays the overlanders more than a month, she—along with eighty-one other members of the Donner Party—finds herself stranded at Truckee Lake on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, stuck there for the entirety of a despairing, blizzard-filled winter. Forced to eat shoe leather and blankets to survive, will Ada be able to battle the elements—and her own demons—as she envisions a new life in California?
Researched with impeccable detail and filled with imagery as wide as the western prairie, Answer Creek blends history and hearsay in an unforgettable story of challenging the limits of human endurance and experiencing the triumphant power of love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sweeney (Eliza Waite) returns with a florid fictional saga of the Donner Party. Tall, intelligent Ada Weeks is a 19-year-old orphan from Indiana on a wagon train from Independence, Mo., to Sutter's Fort, Calif., in 1846. Ada's hardiness, cooperative spirit, and medical know-how (acquired from her adoptive father, an undertaker) come in handy on the trail, and she looks after the children while the parents cook and gather fuel. She also starts up an affair with Patrick Dolan, an Irish teamster, and the two plan to marry. Sweeney's character-driven and painstakingly researched coming-of-age story recounts the party's daily exhausting struggles before reaching the ill-fated Truckee Lake east of the Sierras in California, where Ada spends the winter snowbound and starving, while those at other camps eventually resort to cannibalism. The author conveys the squalor of the cross-continental migration with frank descriptions of bodily functions, sex, and cannibalism in ways decidedly not for the squeamish. Ada is an impressive heroine who thinks for herself and exhibits moral courage in dire straits, and she chooses to eat glue, leather, and blankets rather than human flesh while pining for Patrick, who took a different route through the mountains. This succeeds at capturing the endurance of the human spirit.
Customer Reviews
Answer Creek
After seeing so many dear friends, family and loves lost it’s amazing Ada didn’t just give up. She had such a hard life.