Lake in the Clouds by Sara Donati Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Lake in the Clouds
Book Review: Lake In the Clouds
Summary: 5 Stars
I was very satisfied with how fast the whole transaction was completed. The book I purchased was in excellent condition at a much better price than I could purchase it at a book store. I will continue to use amazon.com to find a book I am interested in buying.Book Review: Lake in the Clouds
Summary: 5 Stars
I think this is my favorite book of the series so far. As a recap (and spoiler if you haven't read the first few books) Elizabeth was a spinster woman who came to America to teach school. However, she meets Nathaniel Bonner and falls in love and together they must elope and find a way to restore property back to its rightful owners, the Mahican. When this has settled they are inexplicably rushed to Scotland to rescue their twins who have been kidnapped. An earl there wants an heir and Nathaniel's son could be it. It leaves with Nathaniel discovering a long lost son who decides to go in his place and they return home to America.
This book has to deal with runaway slaves, smallpox, and other adventures. When Hannah (Nathaniel's daughter) and Elizabeth find a sickly runaway in the woods that is linked to Curiosity (another character in all three books) they know they have to help her gain her freedom and get to Canada. Hannah though is being sent by the local doctor Richard Todd to study in New York on how to give smallpox vaccinations. Though she is half Indian and a woman, she is regarded as a curiosity in New York and allowed to continue her studies. She brings the method back to Paradise with her to inoculate the people there. But unfortunately no one is ever content to let everybody bring happy and strife and lawsuits soon come along.
Donati's writing is always very clear. Luckily in this book she returns to explaining what some of her accents and different languages mean instead of leading it to the reader to try to figure out. There is plenty of description and once again it is written in the third person.
Most of the story is told about Nathaniel's daughter, Hannah, this time. I really like her character and actually enjoy hearing about her more than I do the rest of the Bonners. To be honest, I can't stand the twins. I feel that they were just used as a filler and not very fleshed out by Donati. Elizabeth and Nathaniel take a back seat in this book so their characters are also a little faded away.
Regardless though, it was an interesting book and a good look at what happened in the times back then. The issues of slavery and disease are ones that everyone is familiar with. I definitely recommend this book.
Lake in the Clouds
Copyright 2002
610 pages
Book Review: Lake in the Clouds
Summary: 4 Stars
Another great book in Wilderness Series by Sara Donati, I found this book a little slower of a read than the second book (Dawn on a Distant Shore) but I love the adventure and romance. If you have read the Oulander Series by Diane Galbadon you will love this series.Book Review: Lake in the Clouds
Summary: 4 Stars
This is the third book in the Wilderness series, picking up in 1802, eight years after we last saw the Bonner family in Dawn on a Distant Shore. As in that book, a large portion of this book focuses on Hannah, who has evolved as my favorite character. While her parents go off on a dangerous mission to help a group of runaway slaves achieve freedom, eighteen-year-old Hannah sets off on an adventure of her own to study vaccination methods in New York City. The story alternates between Elizabeth's and Nathaniel's quest, Hannah's time in the city and the people left behind in Paradise, with the youngest Bonner daughter, Lily, and Hannah's nemesis, Jemimah, narrating.
Once again Ms. Donati does an excellent job of bringing the time period to life. I especially enjoyed the depiction of life in New York City and Hannah's time spent working in the almshouse hospital. Here, as everywhere else, Hannah is confronted with the prejudice and ignorance of others who cannot see past the color of her skin, but she is determined to learn as much as she can to take back to the people living on the frontier and she handles it as the intelligent, courageous and courteous woman that she is.
Due to the change of setting in the previous book, we lost track of the characters living in Paradise, but they're all back in this book in all of their colorful glory. But all is not well and there is a lot of death in this story. It's very sad, but when you have a book with so many characters, it's bound to happen, and it's also very realistic. Life was not easy back then and the mortality rate was very high.
Now that I've sung the book's praises, I'll get to what I didn't like. Early on in the book there are a couple of very graphic sex scenes with secondary characters. Graphic sex scenes in general don't bother me, I actually like a healthy dose of sex in my books, but in this case this is a departure from the style of the previous books in the series and it seemed to be done mostly for shock value. Then later in the book when the characters that I actually want to see having sex finally do, I get nothing! Frustrating. That leads me to what has been my biggest complaint in all of the books, that I've felt that the author skipped over some important incidents that deserved to have their own scenes rather than being touched on in the narrative after the fact. It happens again at the end of this one when Hannah makes her decision about what she's going to do with her life and we don't get to witness her take those first steps firsthand. There was also a fairly important plot mystery featuring Hannah's first love that was not resolved at the end of this story and that disappointed me, though I'm hoping this means the story will be revived in one of the future books.
However, my complaints are relatively minimal when compared with the overall quality of the books in this series, the next of which is Fire Along the Sky. I am looking forward to reading it, though I am disappointed to see that it begins ten years down the road when I really would have liked to continue the story right where this book ended.
Book Review: Lake in the Clouds
Summary: 5 Stars
Loved this one! It was good to have the Bonners back in America and to follow the steps of Hannah as she grows into womanhood. What a strong independent young woman she has turned out to be. Sara Donati is one of today's most brilliant historical fiction novelists.