HONOR TO THE HILLS

Now patriarch of a loud and loving Catskills clan, Asher Woods is back—and so is the ghost of Sally Hamilton—in this stunning third novel in the saga that began with The Ghosts of Stony Clove (1988). Following The Time of the Wolves (1994), Charbonneau introduces the next generation in the person of Lily Woods, 15, on the brink of passionate, enduring love for an Irish lad named Hugh. She and her family are outraged by the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, allowing bounty hunters who filter into the North to put chains on free blacks and runaway slaves alike. Then Lily's beloved sister Jane returns to the clove, mute and badly injured in the fire set to her School for Ladies and Misses of Color; 13 girls died in the flames. As Lily's family acts to thwart the slave catchers who have ``retrieved'' the wife of their neighbor and blacksmith, the deliberately lyrical opening scenes (dense with the background that readers new to the saga will need) give way to heated chases, comical meetings, treatises on the nature of family love and the meaning of right and wrong, and sadly, Asher's last days. As the family has settled at Stony Clove, so has Charbonneau's writing matured, making poetry of the glances between lovers and kin, bonding spiritual elements with realistic ones in the atmospheric mountain setting. (Fiction. 12+)