Name: When Winter Comes
ISBN: 9781496716507

V. A. Shannon

A survivor of the Donner Party excursion recounts her life as a teenager escaping an abusive family, taking the journey with the Donner family and enduring a tragic winter in the Sierras.

When Winter Comes

Barbara Williford

Mrs. Klein has a beautiful family, a kind and successful husband, a beautiful home in California, a teaching job she loves but she also has a past that haunts her whole being. A secret past she tells no one except what’s written in a hidden journal.

As a young girl she escapes abusive, drunken parents, the poor slums of Cincinnati where she is forced to steal to survive and where she is forced into prostitution and worse to join the wagon train headed to California. She is accepted in by a family to serve as a maid servant. As she travels through the wagon train she tells of the stories and sights along the way. The dynamics of the group and she is able to survive as a solo young girl. How politics of the party and the desire to be settled changed the lives of so many families on the fateful trail that lead to them being stranded in the Sierra Nevadas. 

The book is very well written, I could not put it down. She uses very descriptive language to describe the trail ride. The book is a novel of historical fiction about the Donnor-Reid party that broke off from the main trail and ended up stranded through an early Winter. So many lives were lost in this attempt.

Trigger warning: there is domestic abuse, a rape scene, child trafficking, violence and graphic content. While it may be rated PG-13, it is still in the book.

When Winter Comes

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