Customer Reviews

The Endless Forest: A Novel

5 star:		(43)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am Rosina Lippi, aka Sara Donati, author of the Wilderness series. To clarify some points of general confusion: This is the sixth and last book in the Wilderness series. The whole series, in order: Into the Wilderness (Wilderness Saga 1), Dawn on a Distant Shore, Lake in the Clouds, Fire Along the Sky, Queen of Swords, and finally: The Endless Forest: A Novel. Thanks to all of you who have left comments and such generous words about the books.

Fans of the Wilderness Saga will enjoy this final volume, though it is decidedly less vivid and exciting than the author's previous and superlative works and may not attract new fans. Ms. Donati brings all the story lines to their denouements in an uncontrived way. Unfortunately, this results in a story decidedly more domesticated that the rest. While one ultimately expects a happy ending, the previous books were full of action and adventures that kept the reader on edge, where every plot twist had potential for heartbreak, death, or other dire and irrevocable perils. The reader rarely has the feeling in this book that things might go seriously awry for the main characters, and never for more than a few pages. While The Endless Forest is still a heartwarming and absorbing read, the characters and the village have all settled down, and consequently so have the plot twists. Some wonderful and well-loved personalities are only barely sketched. With all the children and grandchildren come home to Paradise, there is not room in the story to do them all justice. With no more wars, murderous neighbors, and scheming or vindictive acquaintances in the offing, it is appropriate to end the series. The author closes the book on a thriving Bonner clan in a clever and satisfying way in the Epilogue.
Thank you, Ms. Donati, for the Bonners.

The last installment of the story of the Bonner family was an emotional and satisfying conclusion to this wonderful series. It opens with a prologue narrated by one of my favorite characters and just gets better.

It is 1823 and we are brought up to date on what has happened with Elizabeth and Nathaniel Bonner and their children, spouses and grandchildren since the last book, which ended in 1815. As with any large family, there are joys, problems, challenges and sorrows.

Overseeing all this is Elizabeth, Nathaniel, and of course, Curiosity. The youngest Bonner, Birdie, is a delight to read. She reminds me a little of Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird. The only adult Bonner offspring not married is Daniel, who tends to keep to himself because of a painful war wound that has not healed. Martha Wilde has returned to Paradise with problems of her own, but it is not long before Daniel takes a new interest in his surroundings, namely Martha. When Martha's mother, Jemima, comes back to Paradise and wants to see Martha, the Bonners "circle the wagons" for her. Jemima left Paradise under a cloud of suspicion and animosity. She also left her daughter and step-daughter, Callie, behind. Callie is also beset by problems. Problems that effect her relationship with just about everyone, but especially her stepsister. The root of these problems is Jemima, Martha's mother.

There were also times of joy and amusement, like the Bonner family Sunday dinners, Birdie's take on events happening to her family and her endurance of the little people. Nicholas. I especially enjoyed the description of the Mohawk dances, first with the men and then with the men and women.

I felt this was a book of closure, not only for the series, but for Martha, Callie and Jemima. All of these women were marked by life's circumstances and it was how they handled these circumstances that determined their fate and their legacies. The closure continued with the epilogue, which brought tears to my eyes at certain points. This was a wonderful ending to a wonderful series.

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.

For readers who want closure on the family saga, The Endless Forest provides it. The epilogue is especially entertaining and comforting, like softly falling autumn leaves.

But what this book doesn't provide is a sense of understanding and of being there. It's more biography and dispassionate observation than autobiography and presence. The Endless Forest doesn't make us live and then embrace the decisions the characters make.

Given the build-up to the book, I was looking forward to coming to know Daniel Bonner, an enigmatic charater throughout the saga. While we learn a few new things about him, we never really live in his mind and come to undertstand what motivates and defines him. This is a startling contrast to Queen of Swords, which gave us all of that with Hannah. Readers leave that book with a deep understanding of her resolution, drive, hungers, and loves. Other stories in the saga give us similar entree to the inner lives of Elizabeth, Luke, Lily, and even Nathaniel.

The stories are done and loose ends tidied. The Endless Forest offers fewer adventures, and that's fine. That it offers less psychological and emotional satisfication is not.

I'm sorry to Ms. Lippi/Donati, as i have enjoyed the whole series up to this one. And I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it by any means.

The whole book seemed to consist of people moving from one house to another, up or down the mountain, all to avoid Jemima Southern, vilified almost to the point of being a demon.

Elizabeth devolved into a worry wart who did nothing but obsess about her children, Nathanial became a caricature of himself, Lily was nothing but a fixture (seemingly placed in bed with a complicated pregnancy because the author had nothing else to do with her), etc. I could list more examples. I realize the story focused on Daniel, Martha, Callie, Ethan and Jemima mostly, but the other characters were barely present in any sort of interesting way. To me, the most interesting part of the story were the newspaper entries at the end of the book that neatly summarized what happened to the main characters.

And to be a real nitpicker: Did the endless references to "the little people" (aka the small children and grandchildren) drive anyone else batty?

All in all, I'm glad I read the book as I don't like to leave things unfinished. I'm sorry I paid $20 for it; I wish I would have waited for a used copy.

Having waited so long for the final chapter in this series I was very let down in the reading. In all her books there was excitement and adventure throughout. Her storytelling was exciting because her characters were real and well thought out. You could believe they existed. Having finished the Endless Forrest I am left with the feeling that Ms. Donati was simply bored with it all, wanted to get it done and go on to something else. If she had simply stopped at the last chapter, and left out the epilogue, we as readers could have at least been satisfied with knowing the characters would live on in our memories... but she didn't.

WARNING - SPOILER HERE: It is hard to have invested so much time and interest in the well fleshed characters of her previous books in the series, only to have them die one after another in the last pages. There reader is given no time to recover from the loss. Simply put it was a disappointing read.

Sara Donati brings the story of the Bonners to the most remarkable conclusion in THE ENDLESS FOREST. The timeline has moved to 1824 and it takes place, for the most part, in familiar Paradise, NY. Having loved these books and these characters from the very first word in the very first book, INTO THE WILDERNESS, it's wonderful to find out how they've grown, where life has taken them, and who they've turned out to be. I'm not going to go into too much detail - all the answers will be given in the book. I just wanted to say that there is no disappointment - no lack of adventure or romance. THE ENDLESS FOREST exceeds any expectation and Sara Donati's (Rosina Lippi) voice is as vivid and descriptive as ever. In this book, in particular, though, her talent as a historian and a storyteller shines so brightly. I promise you, when you leave the people of Paradise at the end, you'll feel as though you're letting go of friends, of people you've known and loved for a long time. To turn these fictional characters into such realistic beings is a remarkable talent and I and all the rest of Ms. Donati's readers will be forever grateful. I have just one wish and I'll bet just about everyone joins me in begging for, at least, a short novel or novelette. I would dearly love to know the full, fleshed-out stories of Gabriel and Blue Jay. Just the hope of that would make leaving the Bonners a little easier.

This is a large book but not a lot of action, and certainly not up to her past wonderful books.
Too much dialog and not enough action.

The Endless Forest is the sixth and final book in Sara Donati's series. The series is set in the 1800's and involves a large family living at the edge of ruralness. It's not really necessary to read the other books before this one, but it does help with some of the background and keeping the people straight.

Its years later and Elizabeth and Nathaniel Bonner's children are mostly grown up and starting families of their own. Hannah is the town's doctor and little Birdie is in school, and their own Daniel has finally found happiness in pursuing Martha Kuick. Martha has a terrible mother though and she arrives in town to put a damper on things and cause trouble like she normally does. She has brought a young boy, believed to be her son, with her as well and soon shuffles him off onto the Bonners and their relations. All they want is to live in happiness, but it seems like there is always something happening in the small town of Paradise.

The characters were their old familiar selves from the previous books. Hannah was a bit more matronly and wise than she had been previously, but I suppose age will do that to a person. Regretfully Elizabeth and Nathaniel, while being in the book, don't have as large of parts compared to when the series first started and they were the main characters. The largest set of characters were Martha and Daniel and while they were compelling characters, I didn't find them as enjoyable to read about as Elizabeth and Daniel. Jemima Kuick, Martha's mother, was just as nasty and lowdown as ever.

This plot tended to meander quite a bit. It was more just the telling of what happened in a span of time and the difficulties of normal life than any one set problem that they had to overcome. Sure Jemima presented problems, but that was only part of it. I do like that the epilogue of the story was told in newspaper articles, I thought that was clever. Donati's writing is always very good and you can tell her linguistic background through the use of accents and voices for her characters. I do have to warn though that she doesn't shy away from descriptive sex in this book. If that's not your thing you may want to avoid it.

A nice ending to the series. I enjoyed finding out what happens with all the characters and putting a finish to their stories.

Book One: Into the Wilderness
Book Two: Dawn on a Distant Shore
Book Three: Lake in the Clouds
Book Four: Fire Along the Sky
Book Five: Queen of Swords

The Endless Forest
Copyright 2010
623 pages

Review by M. Reynard 2011