Itchy Donner doesn't have much going for him. A rashy eleven-year-old growing up fatherless in a dying backwoods Idaho timber town, Itchy is obsessed with the past-specifically, his family's past. Itchy's the great-great-great grandson of Tamsen Donner, the Donner Party's famous matriarch, and Itchy studies his ancestor's history with the relentlessness that only a true nerd can muster. He and his mother Irene live poor but happy in a ramshackle singlewide, and Irene encourages Itchy's interest and pride in his illustrious ancestors. But their predictable lives are forever turned upside-down when the wandering gyppo logger Red Donner-Itchy's blustery, larger-than-life father-blows back into town looking to make amends for his past and put his family back together again. ITCHY DONNER is a tragi-comic tale of liars and dreamers, of the distant Donner ghosts who haunt Itchy's present, and of Itchy's quest to understand the past, know his father, and make his family whole again.