The other members of the caravan considered one of the characters, Tamsen Donner, a “witch” basically because she collects herbs and is quite attractive…anyway… This is reinforced by the fact that the caravan crosses Native American territory and many of their then so called “superstitions” are here mixed with more “traditional” beliefs including innumerable religious allusions. “The Hunger” is full of supernatural elements. These background stories give cohesion to the main plot and complement the book perfectly.
We read about what they were doing before joining the caravan and the reason why they had decided to join it. Together with the basic plot, we learn about the previous lives of the main characters. Plus winter is coming, sooner than expected… And they encountered some Indian corpses in the way… This sickness is somehow quite, let’s say, peculiar and out of the ordinary, because its victims change into something not fully human…but animal, feral…įurthermore, they are hearing very scary sounds in the wilderness that surrounds them. Cattle starts to die, some people fell ill from an unknown illness, they are getting very short on food, etc. The Donner family, which was in most ways, the unofficial leader of the caravan, had decided for the group that this was a good idea.Īnd here is where everything turns bad. But at some point, they decided to split from the known path and take what supposedly was a shorter (but mostly unexplored) way according to the advice of a pioneer, Mr. With their descriptions of the situation we can build up the big puzzle which is “The Hunger”.
It develops following their diverse points of view. The different characters narrate the story. However, this part of the new country was still quite unexplored and only some intrepid men had been able to cross the mountains to reach the West and build there Sutter’s Fort.Īnd if those expeditions had been hard and dangerous, imagine doing the travel with whole families (children included) and close to Winter. A group of people united in a caravan to try to travel to the West, to California, departing from the city of Independence.
It takes place in the newly-born United States of America in 1846. However, to say that this book talks only about hunger is to miss a lot of very interesting references and a great variety of layers which are in-built in the story. But this is a different kind of hungriness.
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