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.

Outlander’ is one of my all-time favourite novels, and like so many of her fans I find myself needing a reading supplement to tide me over between Gabaldon’s four year long writing lapses. Reminded me somewhat of Outlander, although not quite so steamy ( that one has a lot of sexual scenes). Into the Wilderness is one of those rare stories that let you breathe the air of another time, and leave your footprints on the snow of a wild, strange place. But there's also Nathaniel, our swoony hero in the buckskin, who sees something in the twenty-nine year old spinster no one else has. People were sometimes very insistent on that, and I know that Diana was sometimes irritated by the whole debate.Even when the second-half of the book turns more inward and sets up the racist townsfolk as the new threat to the Bonner clan, I never really found that to be a substantial plot. let's face it: what is a character from a time-travel romance doing in a purely historical fiction novel?

While Gabaldon's main character, Clair, is comprehensible in her moods, Donati's Elizabeth is an embarrassingly cliché example of female irrationality. I guess it is because Donati had the temerity to make a nod to Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series (with a short passage about a few of Outlander's characters). One day the subject of the Battle of Saratoga came up and Diana mentioned that she had used the battle as a setting for a scene, and this happened just as I was writing a similar scene. Gabaldon’s characters speak into your ear, so believable are their speeches – especially when she is putting weasel words and round-about talk into their mouths. The key to possession of the mountain is Elizabeth, as the Judge has willed it to her on condition she marry the man he's indebted to.But with this journey a whole new world opens up to Nathaniel and Elizabeth–and a destiny they could never have imagined awaits them. 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. 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. All are positioned against a distant time in history where life was hard (really hard, dammit, no hot water! Things have changed a great deal in OUTLANDER fandom in recent years, with many new fans discovering the books as a result of the STARZ TV series.

Gabaldon also has a very distinct and wonderful voice – even the dullest passages (like Claire’s medicinal descriptions) are riveting when written in her succulent, lyrical prose. I've heard many OUTLANDER fans talk about Sara Donati's novel, INTO THE WILDERNESS, and finally decided to read it for myself. The book concludes with an addendum which answers the book's fundamental question--how can one move from the enslavement of sin into God's redeeming grace? Epic in scope, each book weighing in at around 900 pages, this series weaves a tapestry of fact and fiction, sweeping us into another time and place, all of it beginning with a forbidden affair between an unconventional Englishwoman and an American frontiersman. It’s human nature to compare things, though, and there were some pretty heated discussions among readers about my work.

While I enjoyed the series this way of ending it was depressing, almost made me angry as it made it difficult for the reader to remember the characters as they were in the novels. So go pick up a copy, download to the kindle, whatever way makes you happy, just READ it, it will help. And she meets a man different from any she has ever encountered - a white man dressed like a Native American, tall and lean and unsettling in his blunt honesty. There was one part of about 3 hours where they were actually in the wilderness that was interesting, but on a whole that wasn't enough to save it. On the surface, Donati's writing seems as though it could be comparable to Gabaldon's, but, in actuality, it didn't even come close for me.