Into the Wilderness
Sara Donati's Into the Wilderness is a sweeping historical romance that opens her Wilderness series, set in the upstate New York frontier of the 1790s. Twenty nine year old Elizabeth Middleton arrives from England determined to start a school for the children of Paradise, the small woodland settlement where her widowed father has bought a ramshackle estate. Almost immediately she encounters Nathaniel Bonner, a frontiersman raised among the Mohawk, and his father Hawkeye, characters Donati borrows directly from James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales as a deliberate homage. Their slow burn romance is complicated by Elizabeth's father's attempts to marry her off to a local doctor, by competing land claims, and by the tense politics between settlers and the displaced Indigenous people on whose land the village sits. Donati blends Cooper's frontier myths with the woman centered domestic detail of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander, building a long, immersive saga whose later books follow the Bonner family across decades.
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What you might want to know about Into the Wilderness
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Elizabeth Middleton sails from England to her father's frontier village in 1790s upstate New York, expecting to teach school. The widower hunting nearby, raised between two cultures, has other ideas. First in the Wilderness series.
Sara Donati's Wilderness series has six main books, beginning with Into the Wilderness and continuing across decades of frontier American history. The series is complete with The Endless Forest.
Yes, indirectly. Sara Donati and Diana Gabaldon are friends, and a few characters cross over between the two series. The Wilderness series has its own focus on the Bonner family in upstate New York during the late 1700s and early 1800s.
Into the Wilderness was written by Sara Donati, published in 1998 by Delta.
Into the Wilderness is 784 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Into the Wilderness takes most readers 12 to 17 hours to finish.
Into the Wilderness is a standalone novel by Sara Donati, not part of a series.
Into the Wilderness is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
