“The Sweet Blue Distance” is the latest book in a series by Northwest author Rosina Lippi, who writes under the pseudonym Sara Donati.

According to longtime Puget Sound resident Rosina Lippi, who writes many of her historical novels under the pseudonym Sara Donati, the idea for her bestselling “Wilderness” series sparked from a writing exercise she gave to students years ago when she was a university professor: to take characters from novels written by two different authors and have them interact with each other.

Noodling on that idea herself, Lippi introduced Mary Bennett, the plain and pedantic sister from Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” to Hawkeye, James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier hero from “The Leatherstocking Tales.”

Lippi (writing as Donati) eventually created original characters inspired by that exercise. The resulting novel, called “Into the Wilderness,” was the first in what has become a series of books set on what was, in the late 1700s, New York’s western frontier.

This week’s book

“The Sweet Blue Distance” by Sara Donati

Berkley — 800 pp — $29

The heroine in that first book was Elizabeth, an English spinster who’d come to America to pursue her dream of opening a school in the wilderness. Along the way, she fell in love with Between-Two-Lives, a white man who, as a child, had been adopted by the Mohawk people.

In several books more, Donati continued to explore both cross-cultural and cross-generational stories that were taking place on the frontier, until now we arrive at her brand-new book, “The Sweet Blue Distance,” which takes place in 1857.

Carrie Ballentyne is a grandchild of Elizabeth and Between-Two-Lives. But after multiple traumas engulf the family in the New York wilderness, she moves with her widowed mother and brother to New York City — where her mother remarries, and Carrie begins training as a midwife and nurse.

Carrie feels restless in the city, so when she learns of an opening for a nurse in the New Mexico Territory, she seizes upon the opportunity.

Getting to her new post will require traveling by rail and riverboat through some of America’s politically fraught antebellum landscape, then by stagecoach into its new “frontier” — where manifest destiny, disputes with the original inhabitants of the lands, and efforts to populate western territories as either pro- or anti-slavery make the journey even more tumultuous.

Carrie begins the journey accompanied by her younger brother, but complications midway through the trip require that the siblings part ways. Carrie is led by a trusted scout and his small band of men as they travel the rest of the way on horseback across the desert.

It’s a long journey — and at 800 pages, a long book — but it is lively and action-packed. Carrie encounters wranglers and stockmen, charlatans and would-be suitors, and one particularly interesting surveyor.

When she reaches Santa Fe, she discovers that her new employer and his wife have substantially revised their expectations of her. Their complicated lives revive memories of her family’s past that she had hoped to remain buried forever.

Impeccable historical detail, romance, drama, action, adventure and compassionate insight make “The Sweet Blue Distance” a fine addition to a riveting series.

Sara Donati — aka Rosina Lippi — has done it again.