The Endless Forest, a review

Sara Donati’s The Endless Forest, the sixth and final novel in her Wilderness series, is as entertaining as her first, Into the Wilderness. The novel is richly satisfying to a reader of the previous five, and yet will be entertaining to a person not familiar with the series. Donati polled her readers about what they wanted included in the final novel. She’s addressed their disparate requests within a fine story that could have been a jumbled mess in the hands of a lesser writer.

Donati began the Wilderness series with the question: What would happen if James Fennimore Cooper’s Natty Bumpo’s son met a character from Jane Austin’s novels? Bumpo becomes Hawkeye Bonner, marries Cora, and has a son Nathaniel. The novel begins as Elizabeth Middleton comes from England to the New York wilderness town of Paradise in the winter of 1792. The first scene in Into the Wilderness is a tribute to Cooper’s The Pioneers.

The Endless Forest action starts thirty-one years later in Paradise, New York, in the late winter of 1823 with the death of an old Bonner dog and with a hundred-years flood that sends ice and debris to devastate Paradise, symbols of great changes coming to Paradise. All of Elizabeth and Nathaniel Bonner’s children and grandchildren are coming together for the summer.

Previous books have been about Elizabeth and Nathaniel’s stories; daughter Hannah’s, daughter Lily’s, and son Luke’s. This one is told mostly from ten year old daughter Birdie’s and twenty-nine year old son Daniel’s view. Donati keeps true to both a child’s and a man’s perceptions. Daniel as a young man fighting in the War of 1812 in Fire Along the Sky, sustained ongoing painful nerve damage in his shoulder. We find him now as he has come to terms with the pain and the inability to use a rifle. He has followed in Elizabeth’s footsteps, taking over her teaching duties, rather than as he expected, a frontiersman like Nathaniel.

Curiosity Freeman, a friend of the family, appears in all of the novels, serving somewhat as a Greek chorus of one. Curiosity and her husband Galileo were slaves manumitted in Baltimore. They were sent to Paradise in 1761 by Elizabeth’s grandfather to help his daughter Maddie cope with life in the wilderness. Through Curiosity’s story we read Maddie’s heart-rending story as a young wife. We meet Gabriel Oak (his name a nod to another of Donati’s favorite authors, Thomas Hardy) as a young man. He was first introduced as an old man in Lake in the Clouds.

The mysterious death of Cookie, a manumitted slave, that occurs in Fire Along the Sky is finally explained. Elizabeth and Nathaniel’s run from Paradise to marriage and legal security in Into the Wilderness becomes a theme with variations by two other couples in The Endless Forest. Jemima, of the brittle anger, speaks in defense of her mean-spirited actions that have occurred throughout several of the novels. The reader goes through childbirth with two of the Bonner women. Precocious Birdie’s game of Chicken 2 is not to be missed.

The novel’s actions end in 1824. Donati uses a technique she has used in this series and in her contemporary novels written as Rosina Lippi. She completes the novel and the story of the Bonners by using newspaper articles through 1843.

When you’ve finished reading and enjoying The Endless Forest, if you haven’t read the whole series, definitely read all the novels.

Some people and events you’ll encounter in the first 5 novels:

Into the Wilderness:
Governor Schyler of New-York and his wife
Alexander Hamilton
Chingachgook, Cooper’s famous character in The Last of the Mohicans

Dawn on a Distant Shore:
Pirate Anne Bonney
The British ship Leopard with its 3 naturalized Americans
Scottish poet Robert Burns as an exciseman

Lake in the Clouds:
Meriwether Lewis
New York City in 1802

Fire Along the Sky:
The War of 1812 in Canada

Queen of Swords:
New Orleans in 1812, its divisiveness by race, nationality, religion
The Battle of New Orleans, and why the superior British forces lost the battle
Andrew Jackson
The Duke of Wellington's brother-in-law, Sir Edward Pakenham