the wilderness novels: sara donati
Sara Donati is the penname of Rosina Lippi. Sara lives only to write the Wilderness novels.
The series (U.S. editions) in order:
Into the Wilderness | excerpt | print
Dawn on a Distant Shore | excerpt | print
Lake in the Clouds | excerpt | print
Fire Along the Sky | excerpt | print
Into the Wilderness
Kirkus Reviews
People Magazine
Epic in scope, emotionally intense, Into the Wilderness...is an enrapturing, grand adventure.
Bookpage
Dawn on a Distant Shore
[Dawn on a Distant Shore] Donati's skillfully told and captivating romantic historical saga brings a tumultuous era and dashing characters to life in what promises to be a very popular and rewarding series - Booklist
As good as it gets ... Donati writes eloquently about frontier life.
Tampa Tribune
Lake in the Clouds
Reviewed by Barbara Fielding
LAKE IN THE CLOUDS revisits the lives and adventures of Nathaniel and Elizabeth Bonner of Paradise, New York. Elizabeth is a proper Englishwoman who immigrated to the Colonies to teach school and married Nathaniel, a frontiersman raised in the Mohawk Indian ways. This historical adventure finds them raising their twin children Daniel and Lily on their mountain called Hidden Wolf. Hannah Bonner, Nathaniel's firstborn with his late wife, Sings-from-Books, now eighteen years old, is already widely known for her medical skills. She is offered the opportunity to study medicine in New York City at the Kine-Pox Institute and learn the new developments of the vaccine for smallpox.
Curiosity Freeman, a freed slave and housekeeper for Elizabeth's late father Judge Middleton, is assisting runaway slaves through Paradise on their way to Canada. A young black woman, Selah Voyager, is found in the bush on Hidden Wolf by Elizabeth and Hannah. Selah is sick, pregnant and seeking the help of Curiosity Freeman. Hannah treats the desperate young runaway and Nathaniel and Elizabeth take on the dangerous task of guiding Selah to freedom in Canada. This simple act involves the Bonners in the activities of those who aid runaway slaves, and places them all in jeopardy.
Bounty hunter Liam Kirby returns to Paradise seeking the runaway slave. Liam has a history with the Bonners who took him in when he was orphaned as a young man. Liam and Hannah shared a troubled and tender friendship as children, until the Bonners were forced to go to Scotland. During this separation, Liam eventually ran away from Hidden Wolf and went to sea. The Bonners never knew what became of him. An emotionally charged reunion brings Hannah and Liam face to face again. Many townsfolk speculate Liam is back to claim Hannah as his bride and the runaway slave is just the excuse he needed. However, surprising revelations come from their reunion and pit Liam against the family who once sheltered him.
LAKE IN THE CLOUDS is the continuation of Sara Donati's lively historical adventure series, which follows the Bonner family through perilous times. This rousing family drama drawn against the backdrop of Colonial America features an amazing cast of characters which will stir your imagination. Readers will be swept into the political and emotional issues of this rare and special tale. The romance of Nathaniel and Elizabeth Bonner, grown to a passionate maturity, gives the story depth and vitality. The confrontation between Hannah and Liam offers fresh drama to carry this epic tale to new places. In many ways this novel is Hannah's story and turns on her self-discovery and choices she makes.
There is an interesting tie with these characters to the historical novel, LAST OF THE MOHICANS by James Fennimore Cooper. Author Sara Donati is said to have borrowed Hawkeye and Cora Bonner from Cooper's works, as parents for Nathaniel Bonner. Donati says she speculated "what if" Nathaniel fell in love and married "an Elizabeth Bennet-type Englishwoman" from PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, and used them as inspiration in the creation of her characters.
This brilliant tapestry is the third novel in the series. The tale begins with INTO THE WILDERNESS and is followed by DAWN ON A DISTANT SHORE. I would not recommend LAKE IN THE CLOUDS as a stand alone novel. They are all lengthy tomes but don't let that discourage you from reading them; each is a treat all its own. I understand the author is under contract for two more novels in this series and I eagerly await their publication. This tale also includes a cameo appearance of historical figure, Captain Meriwether Lewis. This book is a definite keeper and the kind of story you'll be telling all your friends to read.
Fire Along the Sky
Donati continues the saga of the valiant Bonner family, last seen in 2002's Lake in the Clouds , in this sprawling, slow-to-start epic starring four formidable women. It's 1812, and Elizabeth Bonner—teacher, crusader and second wife of hunter/trapper/farmer Nathaniel—is still living in a mountain cabin above the village of Paradise in upper New York State. With her is her restless, independent daughter, Lily, whose plans to study art in England were dashed by the beginnings of the war. Nearby in Montreal is the newly widowed Scotswoman Lady Jennet, who has come to the new world to find the man she should have married, Nathaniel's son Luke. And arriving presently is Hannah, Nathaniel's half-Mohawk daughter by his first wife; after 10 years as a healer with her mother's people, Hannah comes home to recover from a terrible personal tragedy. This saga sees Lily through one disastrous romance and then a second, tempestuous but ultimately successful one, and Lady Jennet—a charming storyteller and Tarot reader—through the American invasion of French Canada, where another Bonner son is wounded and imprisoned. Hannah embarks on a search for peace and, along with Jennet, aids the prisoners held in Canada's Nut Island stockade. This is an episodic but entertaining novel held together by the kind of family loyalties that defy cruelty, war and even fate itself.
Queen of Swords
Booklist Review
Sarah Johnson
In the fifth volume of her popular Wilderness series, after Fire along the Sky (2004), Donati sweeps readers into two strong women's personal journeys of rescue and redemption. It is 1814 in the French Antilles, where Scots noblewoman Jennet Scott Huntar is being held captive. But when her future husband, Luke, and his half-sister, Hannah, finally locate and free her, their troubles have just begun. To ensure the safety of her son, born during her imprisonment, Jennet had made a devil's bargain with a dissolute, untrustworthy man. As the trio travels from Pensacola to New Orleans in their attempts to learn the child's whereabouts, Jennet struggles to heal herself and her marriage, while Hannah, half-Mohawk, uses her medical training to help the city's Indian populace and faces deadly illness herself. It's both a smoothly written, engrossing adventure about an early American family and a vivid depiction of the little-explored War of 1812, yet it's more than that. Donati also delves into much deeper realities, such as race and prejudice in one of America's famously multicultural cities, the complex patterns of revenge, the price of loyalty during wartime, and the transformative power of love. Avid historical fiction and romance readers will devour it.
The Endless Forest
The Seattle Times (original source)
review by Melissa Bargreen
The Endless Forest
by Sara Donati
Fans of Sara Donati's wonderful "Wilderness Series" of historical novels will greet this newest one with mixed emotions: It is the last of six books about a splendidly drawn cast of characters living more than 200 years ago in the little village of Paradise, N.Y. Eager as Donati's readers will be to catch up on the adventures of the remarkable Bonner family and their cohorts, it's painful to realize that this saga is now at an end (except for re-readings, of course).
And Sara Donati, who is really the nom de plume of Northwest writer Rosina Lippi, presumably will retire after this final effort; Lippi's Web site quips, "Sara lives only to write the Wilderness novels."
It's been a great run. The first book, "Into the Wilderness," opens in 1792, when the bookish and forthright Elizabeth moves from her cozy home in England to the spartan, mountainous frontier town of Paradise to be the schoolteacher there.
She encounters Nathaniel Bonner, the son of Daniel "Hawkeye" Bonner (hero of James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans"), setting in motion a richly imagined series of events. Over the course of the subsequent novels ("Dawn on a Distant Shore," "Lake in the Clouds," "Fire Along the Sky" and "Queen of Swords"), the Bonner clan and assorted friends — and some particularly nasty foes — undergo a series of adventures and romances that boggle the imagination.
In the new "The Endless Forest," Donati kick-starts the action with a "once in a century" flood in 1824 that sweeps through the little village, ruining everything in its wake.
While the small community — in which freed black slaves, Mohawks and Quakers live peacefully side by side — is still coping with the death and destruction wrought by the flood, some long-absent key characters in this series return to Paradise. They bring with them many intriguing complications: Elizabeth and Nathaniel's daughter Lily and her husband, returning from a long stay abroad, want more than anything to have a child together, but haven't been successful thus far. And Martha Kirby, a young woman who is Nathaniel's ward, comes back to the Bonners after her birth mother — the evil Jemima, who abandoned her as a child — has maliciously ended Martha's engagement to a boring but worthy New Yorker.
Jemima's impending return to Paradise hangs over the last portion of the book like a Category 5 hurricane swirling toward landfall. Amoral and conniving, she has ruined — even ended — several lives already. For Martha, the fear of what Jemima might now do is compounded by her horror at the idea that Martha might also bear the taint of her mother's twisted nature.
Does this book stand on its own, or does it function only as the conclusion to the series? It helps that Donati has crafted an introduction from conversations and letters by two of her most remarkable characters — the freed slave and wise woman named Curiosity, and the book's central figure, Elizabeth Bonner. The reader who will enjoy "The Endless Forest" the most, however, is almost certainly one who has already read at least some of the novel's predecessors.
Underscoring the finality of this last installment is an epilogue in which a series of news items explain the eventual achievements and fates of the characters readers have grown to love. It's like reading the obituary of a beloved relative.