Fire Along the Sky

Continuing her epic Bonner family saga, Sara Donati opens this episode in 1812, when Nathaniel's daughter Hannah, recovering from the tragic loss of her husband and child, returns home to Paradise. Infected with "war fever," all the young men of Paradise are ready to enlist, including Daniel, Hannah's 18-year-old stepbrother. Adventure, romance, frontier lore, and the effects of war on those at home are all part of this sprawling tale of early American life in the Northeastern wilderness. Narrator Kate Reading's deft use of voices is never overly dramatic, always controlled, and consistently believable. As the members of the extended Bonner clan face their individual challenges, Reading's performance invests them with distinct, immediately recognizable personalities. Her lively, intelligent reading gives Donati's well-researched historical fiction the power it deserves. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

August 16, 2004
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. Agent, Jill Grinberg.