I once read a facetious remark that there are only two plots in all of fiction: somebody goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. Both of these happen in Lake in the Clouds, Sara Donati’s third installment in the story of the Bonner family of Paradise, New York, and at times I came close to feeling a little overwhelmed by everything that was going on in the book. Readers familiar with the series will probably enjoy the book well enough, but this is definitely not the place for new readers to begin.

The placid rhythm of life in the Bonner homestead on Hidden Wolf Mountain is disturbed by the arrival of a runaway slave named Selah. Fevered and heavy with child, she needs an escort for the rest of her journey to freedom. It falls to Hannah Bonner to cure her fever, and Hannah’s father and stepmother, Nathaniel and Elizabeth, to accompany the fugitive north. Hot on Selah’s heels is Liam Kirby, a childhood friend of Hannah’s who’s become a bounty hunter. To add to the mix, Hannah is committed to go down to New-York City to learn the techniques of vaccination against smallpox. There are a couple of births, several deaths, and lots of traveling as Hannah comes to realize what her purpose in life is.

While her parents do play a big part in the story, this is really Hannah’s book. As the daughter of a white man and a Mohawk woman, she has had to walk in both worlds; as she gets older, this straddling act grows increasingly difficult. In addition, as a woman she’s an outsider in the world of medicine, and she has to fight the male doctors for acceptance as a peer. Then, as if she doesn’t already have enough to handle, her uncle Otter shows up with his brother-in-law, the widowed Strikes-the-Sky. Hannah mistrusts the immediate attraction she feels for this stranger and spurns his forthright yet low-key advances; she knows that marriage to him would mean leaving Lake in the Clouds and her family.

The scope of the book is pretty large, with dozens of characters. I’m glad there’s a list of who’s who at the front of the book; I found myself flipping to it even toward the end of the story. Donati deals with many themes, with varying degrees of success: greed, theft, death, love, revenge, social and personal justice. While the plot moves well enough and the descriptions are well done, some of the dialogue sounds stiff and stilted, especially those conversations that take place in a language other than English. At times matters get a little confusing: one of the plot lines ends on a pretty cryptic note, and I was left scratching my head over how a deathbed revelation was supposed to fit in with the rest of that particular thread.

It’s obvious – sometimes awkwardly so – that Donati has done lots of research. The medical stuff is actually pretty interesting, but some of the post-colonial politics hit me as superfluous, and the addition of real historical figures seemed artificial and distracting. Did we really need to meet Senator DeWitt Clinton, or Merriwether Lewis? I couldn’t see any real purpose in including them, because their integration in the story was so incomplete.

But for me the biggest difficulty in the book was Hannah’s relationship with Strikes-the-Sky. She likes him, she resents him, she’s attracted to him, she fights her attraction, she’s angry that everybody else seems to have decided he’s The One For Her. I didn’t see enough of him, let alone enough of the two of them together, to understand what impels her toward her final decision regarding him, and I didn’t at all buy that snap! just like that, she’d make the decision she did.

In spite of the difficulties I had with the book, however, Lake in the Clouds was readable, and if you’ve read the other two books in the series, you’ll probably enjoy another visit with Nathaniel and Elizabeth Bonner’s extended family and neighbors in northern New York. Fans of Gabaldon’s Outlander series will undoubtedly like Donati’s family saga – but remember, start at the beginning!