Very, very boring. 

Partly because I am not as interested in the whole Donner Party thing as people in the US seem to be. It doesn’t seem creepy or fascinating to me. Just a very standard story of people overreaching themselves and suffering the obvious consequences.

A worse problem though is that it’s not very good. There are so many sometimes offensively stereotypical elements - the hero with a dark secret and a weakness for woman whose heart died with the beloved he tragically lost and who believes he can never live again, the dangerous and seductive married woman, the “not like other girls” love interest whose father doesn’t approve, the forbidden love between a young girl and a native, the prissy neurotic who’s secretly a tormented homosexual living a life of shame.

The ultimate product is nearly 400 pages of character templates wandering about referencing history and horror tropes a bit, and then the end. I don’t get the impression that Katsu is particularly interested in either history or horror, so I guess she just thought this would sell well?