Gregory Harris

In 1846, a small group of settlers who flocked to golden California to seek their fortunes met disaster instead. While the westward trek bore many hazards that claimed their share of lives, the group known as the Donner Party has become synonymous with a doom brought on by ill fate and ill planning—doom, and a fate more gruesome than death. Trapped in remote mountains by paralyzing blizzards and desperately short of supplies, some of the group resorted to cannibalism to survive.

Now the story of that perilous journey is retold in James D. Houston's sensitive, moving and compassionate novel, Snow Mountain Passage. Houston's prose vividly recalls the settlers who banded together to trek across the empty plains, and who would wind up depending on each other for survival. Houston tells the story from two perspectives the experiences of James Frazier Reed, who traveled with the Donner Party along with his wife and children, and the recollections of his daughter, Patty, as an elderly woman. Houston skillfully weaves the two timelines and perspectives he tells Reed's story as events unfold, but presents Patty's memories 50 years after the fact. Reed's experiences on the trail serve as a metaphor for the entire settler experience. Enthralled by the prose of a self-appointed prophet of westward migration, he leaves in search of better land and a healthier climate for his ailing wife. Forced to defend himself when a trailside argument turns violent, Reed learns that frontier justice is different from his civilized expectations, and he is expelled from the party. Riding ahead, he becomes the party's only hope when he crosses the mountains just ahead of the storm.

Having encountered former traveling companion Charles Stanton heading with supplies to the party's relief, Reed believes they are safe. But as Patty recalls, the small group of rescuers arrives only as more savage weather engenders an equally savage struggle for survival.

Houston reveals the tragic consequences arising from a combination of prosaic decisions, such as which fork of a trail to take and the unpredictable nature of the elements. In this notable book, the reader shares the lives and experiences of a group which has become a tragic footnote in history.

Gregory Harris is a writer and editor in Indianapolis.

In the turbulent early days of revolutionary Russia, Bolshevik agents herded the deposed Tsar Nicholai II, his family and aides into the basement of a Siberian house and executed them all in a blaze of gunfire. Details of what happened that fateful night have taken decades to emerge, reaching a terrible climax with the 1991 excavation of a mass grave believed to be the one in which some of the members of the Romanov family were buried.

Writer Robert Alexander, a fluent Russian speaker who studied in Leningrad, became fascinated with an obscure reference in the Empress Alexandra's personal journal shortly before her death, noting that their kitchen boy had been sent away. This brief reference from a forgotten 1918 diary took root in Alexander's imagination and, after much research, blossomed as his new novel The Kitchen Boy. This intriguing work of speculative historical fiction recreates the last days of the tsar through the eyes of the young Leonka, who recalls how he secretly returned to the Siberian house that served as the Romanovs' prison and witnessed their execution.

The novel successfully maintains an intense atmo-sphere of peril and suspense despite the reader's foreknowledge of the Romanovs' fate. The calamity is heightened by the fierce, almost primal protectiveness the parents showed toward their children who nevertheless would die with them—invoking compassion for the royal family as people rather than dusty national symbols. Despite the sympathetic portrayal of the tsar and his family, Alexander doesn't ignore the judgment of history. As Leonka notes, however well-intentioned Nicholai and his empress may have been, their rule over Russia was a legacy of war, revolution, corruption and oppression. But the thuggish Bolshevik revolutionaries fare no better under the novel's scrutiny.

The Kitchen Boy is a fascinating and suspenseful glimpse of a tempestuous but shadowy period in Russian history. It's also a moving portrait of a family that, despite their legendary role in world events, proved in the end to be as mortal as the rest of us.

Gregory Harris is a writer, editor and technology consultant in Indianapolis.