Helping Women Pursue Happiness

Into the Wilderness
Sara Donati

One of my favorite ways to refuel is to dive into an engrossing novel.  I love to find a series that mixes historical fiction, a little romance, complex action, and characters I feel like I know.

I was born in Cooperstown, NY, but I have to admit I never read James Fenimore Cooper (I’ve never gone to the Baseball Hall of Fame either, but that’s a different story).  I will watch Daniel Day-Lewis over and over in the film version of The Last of the Mohicans, but the novels themselves are just a tad dry.  Cooper's novels captured Sara Donati’s imagination, though, and I’m glad they did.

Sara Donati (pen name of Rosina Lippi) somehow managed to pick up where Cooper left off and make the continued saga so compelling that I have waited with bated breath for each of the five books in the series.  Number six will be released soon.

Elizabeth and Nathaniel are the main characters, Elizabeth being recently arrived from England to 1792 upstate New York and Nathaniel being the son of Hawkeye.  (Hawkeye is the part Day-Lewis played in the movie.  Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H was named after the character.)  I would keep reading even if it was simply a love story, but it’s much more than a romance, with intricacies of the politics of the time, the maze of white-Indian relationships, and tales of adventure and survival in the untamed wilderness.

Eat, Pray, Love
Elizabeth Gilbert

Most of us experience the duality of trying to satisfy our inner urges, to find and express our talents, and at the same time to fit in to the family and culture where we find ourselves.  We all have some conflict between being true to ourselves as unique individuals and our primal need to belong to the herd.  Mostly those conflicts are played out on a very small stage – in our inner dialogue or over a bottle of wine with a best friend or sometimes in an argument with an important member of our herd. 

But Liz Gilbert doesn’t just have a conflict, she has a crisis.  I mean 9/11, a nasty divorce, and clinical depression all at once?  Even a Superwoman cape would wear thin in that situation.  It’s the extreme nature of that crisis that drives her to learn to take extremely good care of herself.  A yearlong journey from Italy to India to Indonesia also leads Gilbert to the depths of her soul.  She finds healing and holiness and love, all of which she reveals to us with breath-taking transparency.