Naomi Dawn Musch

     Bonnie Leon has once again taken the reader to America’s last frontier in her novel Touching the Clouds. In the story, Kate Evans is a young pilot living with the haunting memory of surviving a crash that killed her best friend. Determined to overcome the fears of her past and answer her heart’s call to find healing and adventure, Kate breaks off her engagement and heads to Alaska, which is not yet a state. Flying north in her Ballanca Pacemaker, she hopes to become an Alaskan bush pilot, despite the odds against her being a woman in a man's harsh frontier.

     Bonnie Leon always writes with authenticity. This book is no exception. You can almost see the pearly white caps of the mountains peeking out below the clouds, feel the icy blasts of winter wind, and hear the howl of the wolves.

     And Bonnie can build tension.

     That was one of the best things about this book. From the first chapter on I was in suspense about what was going to happen to this young woman. Every time she got in her plane and took off, every time she crossed a mountain range or headed out on a mail run, I held my breath. What was going to happen? Would it be this time, on this run?

     The characters were very much real. There was good layering. The romance wasn’t sappy but genuine. Bonnie didn’t let her emotions get ahead of her as she told her character’s stories; she held them back, and did a good job of keeping the reader turning pages, anticipating. As a writer, I found myself studying, asking , how did she do that? Sometimes as I'm reading someone else's book, I tell myself, here's where I'd do such and such. In this case, Bonnie's instincts were dead on. While at first I considered the pacing to be a bit slow, I later realized that it had done the job of building the suspense needed for this story. 

     The book had a satisfying ending, even though it seemed to happen rather abruptly. I would have liked the last page, the final scene to wind out a little more slowly than it did, but all in all, it was a great story, and I think it leaves readers with a hint and longing of what’s to come in book two of the Alaskan Series.