INTO THE WILDERNESS (The Wilderness Series Book 1)

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The book tells the story of a twenty-nine-year-old Englishwoman, Elizabeth Middleton, who travels to a remote area of New York State in 1792, to take up residence there with her father and brother. I appreciate the nod to James Fennimore Cooper and the brief mention of characters from Diana Gabaldon's Outlander and for me Sara Donati's books outshine the latter considerably. Although born in the United Kingdom, she lived the first forty years of her life in Zimbabwe, where she met and married her husband, Kingsley. And, this is something I frequently remark on, both her male and female protagonists are equally compelling.

And we all know how love leads to such standard scenarios as inter-familial feuding, plots to break into jail, and secret meetings involving waterfalls and bearskins. She believes reading should be for pleasure, and can be found scoping out alpha males in pretty much any historical fiction book setting. In this captivating book about sin, Kenneth Swanson acknowledges human brokenness and our inability to reverse the cycle of sin and self-absorption unless we turn to the God who created us in his image and loves us. Still, however, several “scenes,” and truthfully, sometimes they felt beautiful and the timing in the plot fit just right but then many times I felt like our author said, “oh, it’s been a while since we had a scene, we better have one now,” and that annoyed me.I also like thrillers, science, fiction, and anything that presents women in a refreshingly truthful manner (see Stieg Larsson). I’m going to attempt to summarise each of the blurbs for the rest of this article so that you can get a feel for what the series is about.

While a little less steamy, their love reminds me of Jamie and Claire’s and they are the anchor for the majority of series. The fact is during the colonial and Federal period, school teachers in America were overwhelmingly under twenty-five, White and male. I've heard many OUTLANDER fans talk about Sara Donati's novel, INTO THE WILDERNESS, and finally decided to read it for myself. Set in a remote, mountainous New York village, in a United States that has only just won its independence, Into the Wilderness is the story of Elizabeth Middleton, recently of England. Her simple role as teacher pf the village children is complicated by her burgeoning feminist leanings, conflicts with slave owners, and increasing “entanglement” with the mysterious Nathaniel Bonner.

They stood leaning toward each other across the awkward expanse of their snowshoes, joined like a wishbone by the soft suckling of mouths. Elizabeth Middleton from the beginning struck me as far too modern in her sensibilities--she doesn't seem to care about class or race and wants to keep her independence and remain unmarried. New Orleans is a city on the brink of war, a city where prejudice thrives and where Hannah, half Mohawk, must tread softly. Personally it didn’t quite sweep me up as I’d hoped, but maybe that’s because I’ve had enough of these flawless (sometimes self-righteous) men and their “wolfish grins” forever cast on the women they love. However, two examples of a lack of grounding in the period stood out to me before the fifty page mark.

Not only wouldn't a person assume a teacher would be female--the feminization of the profession didn't begin until late in the 19th Century--but Miss Middleton would invariably have stirred up opposition because of her gender.A new series based on later generations of the same families was launched September 1, 2015 with The Gilded Hour. As a teacher, you'd think she would have at least tried to correct his and her children's speech patterns. Legends of the Fall (1994) might be the closest we ever get to seeing the prototypical “frontiers couple” on-screen. In ‘Into the Wilderness’ I often thought that characters weren’t very convincing in their diatribes.

The book goes beyond an analysis of sin by opening the path from sin to redemption, from unhappiness to joy, finally laying out a path from the despair of sin to the joy of spiritual renewal and freedom. Jean-Benoit Savard, the great-grandson of French settlers, slaves, and Choctaw and Seminole Indians, is the one man who knows the city well enough to engineer the miracle that will reunite the Bonners and send them home to Lake in the Clouds. When Elizabeth Middleton, 29 years old and unmarried, leaves her Aunt Merriweather's comfortable English estate to join her father and brother in the remote mountain village of Paradise on the edge of the New York wilderness, she does so with a strong will and an unwavering purpose: to teach school. Donati’s acknowledgements come before the story, in which she showers thanks upon Gabaldon for helping her with it.Instead Nathaniel is imprisoned and finds himself in imminent danger of being hanged as an American spy. I can understand your thoughts on the characters but one can't compare apples to oranges when it comes to DG and SD :-) Sure, there are *down* times but I haven't found one series that doesn't have a *hurry up and move on* moment for me. But even back then I loved historical fiction, as my friend well knew, and thick books had never put me off either.