Fire Along the Sky
From
Publishers Weekly
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.
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