A corporate merger may soon threaten his job.
He can t quite commit he doesn t know why to his Japanese American girlfriend and her five year old son. The story is told by her great grandson, Sheridan Brody, a Bay Area talk show host, whose life has reached an unexpected standstill. It centers on a California woman, half Indian, half Hawaiian, who became consort and confidante to the last king of Hawaii. What happens who dies, who survives, and why is brilliantly, grippingly told.įrom the author of Snow Mountain Passage, a saga of the Donner Party, comes a deeply engaging new novel, set in both our time and the late nineteenth century. Snow Mountain Passage is an extraordinary tale of pride and redemption. And through the amazingly imagined ‘Trail Notes’ of Patty Reed, who recollects late in life her experiences as a child, we also follow the main group, progressively stranded and starving on the Nevada side of the Sierras. We follow Reed during the next five months as he travels around northern California, trying desperately to find means and men to rescue his family. It comes in the sudden fight between Reed and a drover a fight that exiles Reed from the others, sending him solo over the mountains ahead of the storms. It comes in the fateful choice of a wrong route, which causes the group to arrive at the foot of the Sierra Nevada too late to cross into the promised land before the snows block the way. And as they journey across the country, thrilling to new sights and new friends, coping with outbursts of conflict and constant danger, trouble comes. From the moment we meet Reed proud, headstrong, yet a devoted husband and father traveling with his family in the ‘Palace Car,’ a huge, specially built covered wagon transporting the Reeds in grand style, the stage is set for trouble.
The people whose dreams, courage, terror, ingenuity, and fate we share are James Frazier Reed, one of the leaders of the Donner Party, and his wife and four children in particular his eight year old daughter, Patty. James Houston takes us inside this central American myth in a compelling new way that only a novelist can achieve. Snow Mountain Passage is a powerful retelling of the most dramatic of our pioneer stories the ordeal of the Donner Party, with its cast of young and old risking all, its imprisoning snows, its rumors of cannibalism.
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