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Fire Along the Sky, Sara Donati
Bantam
Reviewed by Kath Brown (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

This is the fourth book about the adventures of the Bonner women, which started with Into the Wilderness.

Set in the American north-east, this episode in the lives of Elizabeth Bonner, her daughter Lily, step-daughter Hannah (whose mother was Mohawk) and their various men, opens in 1812.

Hannah has returned to the family home, a mountain cabin in Paradise, but she is a shell of her former self, holding a grief so great she cannot speak about it. Her 17-year-old sister Lily has fallen in love with an unsuitable man and Lily's twin Daniel and his cousin Blue-Jay are about to go off to war.

This is the pretty-much unknown war that was waged between the Americans in New York state and French Canada (Quebec). It was relatively short as wars go but lasted long enough for the two boys to get captured, for Hannah and her half-brother Luke's fiancee to go off to doctor them (Hannah is a healer - women were not doctors back then) and for further disaster that will lead, very satisfactorily, into the next instalment.

In the meantime, life has gone on as it does, back in Paradise, with murders, suicides and ho-hum deaths, a fair bit of sex and, of course, a great deal of love. Just what we want from an historical romance.

Donati's narrative is easy to follow and each book can be read as a story in itself but, of course, is much more satisfactory if you are following the family and their friends from go to whoa.

Donati weaves native Indian lore and practice, slavery and runaways, and the harsh reality of wilderness living into an epic that has carried through four books (this one is 608 pages long) and is set for the fifth. These are real people in a special place.