Tales Between the Pages

I got this book from the public library.

Goodreads Description of Lake in the Clouds by Sara Donati

It is the spring of 1802, and the village of Paradise is still reeling from the typhoid epidemic of the previous summer. Elizabeth and Nathaniel Bonner have lost their two-year-old son, Hannah’s half brother Robbie, but they struggle on as always: the men in the forests, the twins Lily and Daniel in Elizabeth’s school, and Hannah as a doctor in training, apprenticed to Richard Todd. Hannah is descended from healers on both sides–one Scots grandmother and one Mohawk–and her reputation as a skilled healer in her own right is growing.

After a long night spent attending to a birth, Elizabeth and Hannah encounter an escaped slave hiding on the mountain. She calls herself Selah Voyager, and she is looking for Curiosity Freeman–a former slave herself, one of the village’s wisest women and Elizabeth’s closest friend. The Bonners take Selah, desperately ill, to Lake in the Clouds to care for her, and with that simple act they are drawn into the secret life that Curiosity and Galileo Freeman and their grown children have been leading for almost ten years. The Bonners will do what they must to protect the Freemans, just as Hannah will protect her patient, who presents more than one kind of challenge. For a bounty hunter is afoot–Hannah’s childhood friend and first love, Liam Kirby.

While Elizabeth and Nathaniel undertake a treacherous journey through the endless forests to bring Selah to safety in the north, Hannah embarks on a very different journey to New-York City, with two goals: to learn the secrets of vaccination against smallpox, a disease that threatens Paradise, and to find out what she can about Liam’s immediate past and what caused him to change so drastically from the boy she once loved. The obstacles she faces as a woman and a Mohawk make her confront questions long avoided about her place in the world.

Those questions follow her back to Paradise, where she finds that the medical miracle she brings with her will not cure prejudice or superstition, nor can it solve the problem of slavery. No sooner have the Bonners begun to rebound from their losses–old and new–than they find themselves confronted by more than one old enemy in a battle that will test the strength of their love for one another. Hannah faces the decision she has always dreaded: will she make a life for herself in a white world, or among her mother’s people?

The Scoop: Review of Lake in the Clouds by Sara Donati

To be honest, I didn’t enjoy Lake in the Clouds by Sara Donati as much as I enjoyed Into the Wilderness and Dawn on a Distant Shore, the first two books in the series. Don’t get me wrong, I still thought it was an enjoyable read. I liked it a lot, in fact. Ultimately, though, Donati experiences some growing pains writing this series. Lake in the Clouds is very much a transitional novel, switching from Elizabeth and Nathaniel’s primary POV to Hannah and Lilly’s POV. From what I can tell, this is because these two characters play a more important role in the later series.

Despite the growing pains, I found a grown up Hannah quite refreshing. Her time in New York was utterly fascinating. Hannah is very much in her own head. She pays attention to the world around her, but not with the kind of detail that I thought she should have. Her diary entries, though fascinating, seemed a bit like a cop-out so Donati could move the plot along. Like I said before, transitional novel. A lot has to happen in this book and it’s already about 700 pages long.

Once Hannah returns to Lake in the Clouds, the most fascinating thing happens: the pace slows down for the characters yet the narrative is rushed. She works with Dr. Richard Todd to vaccinate the town against smallpox. She helps fight a scarlet fever epidemic. She has to handle Jemima Southern (who I absolutely hate). During this time, Lilly starts to come into her own. Donati gives her more time than I think she should have. Lilly doesn’t really DO anything to advance the plot other than learn to draw and predict who Hannah marries. This might irk me, but Lilly is such an interesting character. I can see why Donati chose to give her more page time. Apparently she’s a big character in the next novel.

In any case, I still gave this book 4 stars because, according to my rating system, I “really liked it.” I did really like it despite its growing pains. I think it’s an exceedingly hard job to write an epic family series. Transitioning from one generation to the next can be quite difficult. Though Donati doesn’t do it as well as some that I’ve read, she does do a good enough job to keep a reader interested.

Rating:  

© 2012, Jessica Workman Holland. All rights reserved.