To Stay Alive: Mary Ann Graves and the Tragic Journey of the Donner Party [Hardcover]

Told in riveting, keenly observed poetry, a moving first-person narrative as experienced by a young survivor of the tragic Donner Party of 1846.

The journey west by wagon train promises to be long and arduous for nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Graves and her parents and eight siblings. Yet she is hopeful about their new life in California: freedom from the demands of family, maybe some romance, better opportunities for all. But when winter comes early to the Sierra Nevada and their group gets a late start, the Graves family, traveling alongside the Donner and Reed parties, must endure one of the most harrowing and storied journeys in American history. Amid the pain of loss and the constant threat of death from starvation or cold, Mary Ann’s is a narrative, told beautifully in verse, of a girl learning what it means to be part of a family, to make sacrifices for those we love, and above all to persevere.The cadence of the poems slows, becoming deliberate and labored, as Mary Ann is overcome by exhaustion, dehydration, and starvation, then picks up with ghastly speed as she gorges on raw deer meat in the wilderness...The gravity of the cannibalism, now synonymous with the Donner Party, is treated deftly, conveying Mary Ann’s visceral reactions without becoming steeped in grisly detail. As loss compounds loss, brevity and repetition (“I stitch... I stitch”) intensify key moments in a harrowing, exhausting trek.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

In this compelling verse novel, Brown (Caminar, rev. 3/14) imagines the Don- ner Party’s harrowing survival tale as experienced by nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Graves, a real-life member of the expedition...fascinating back matter (including a pho- tograph of Mary Ann taken thirty years after the book’s events) fills in historical details and separates fact from fiction. A nuanced and haunting portrayal of the indomitable human spirit.
—Horn Book (starred revl£.