Cold Mountain

Cold Mountain
by Charles Frazier

Cold Mountain
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Book Summary Information

Author: Charles Frazier
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-08-31
ISBN: 0802142842
Number of pages: 464
Publisher: Grove Press

Book Reviews of Cold Mountain

Book Review: Okay, I changed my mind...
Summary: 5 Stars

I didn't want to read this book. I picked it up because my daughter was required to read it prior to starting high school, and I figured I'd keep her company. And as anyone following my tweets can attest, I hated it. I cursed it for being boring, cursed the school for assigning a book that could turn kids off of reading indefinitely. The degree to which my opinion of the book has since changed is almost comical.

Cold Mountain tells the story, usually in alternating chapters, of Inman, a Confederate soldier, and the woman he loves, Ada. When the book opens, Inman is in a hospital in North Carolina, having been shot in the neck in fighting outside of Petersburg, Virginia. When he's reasonably recuperated--his wound yet a supurating sore but no longer likely to kill him--he determines to walk home rather than return to the army, a trek that means months of hardship and could end in his being captured or shot by the Home Guard, who are on the hunt for deserters. Ada, for her part, is back home facing her own difficulties, the hard business of surviving, for which she has been woefully unprepared. The life stories of the various characters whom the two meet are woven into the narrative as well, so that the book is larger in scope than it would be if it were only focused on Inman and Ada.

A summary of the book can't possibly do it justice. In telling the small story of Inman and Ada, Cold Mountain manages to tell a much larger one: it describes the life of the average man in the South during the Civil War years, the grueling work that mere survival required. But against a miserable backdrop, the difficulties imposed by nature and by the cruelty of one's fellows, hope remains possible. And redemption.

So I'm no longer cursing Frazier's masterpiece (though I still think the early part about Inman's friendship with Swimmer would best be omitted). Nor am I cursing my daughter's assignment. In fact, I'm impressed that her school assigned a book that is not only challenging but also often indelicate. This is refreshing in world that is so often politically correct to the point of madness.

-- Debra Hamel

Summary of Cold Mountain

In 1997, Charles Frazier?s debut novel Cold Mountain made publishing history when it sailed to the top of The New York Times best-seller list for sixty-one weeks, won numerous literary awards, including the National Book Award, and went on to sell over three million copies. Now, the beloved American epic returns, reissued by Grove Press to coincide with the publication of Frazier?s eagerly-anticipated second novel, Thirteen Moons. Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, the intrepid Ada is trying to revive her father?s derelict farm and learning to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away. As it interweaves their stories, Cold Mountain asserts itself as an authentic odyssey, hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving.

The hero of Charles Frazier's beautifully written and deeply-imagined first novel is Inman, a disillusioned Confederate soldier who has failed to die as expected after being seriously wounded in battle during the last days of the Civil War. Rather than waiting to be redeployed to the front, the soul-sick Inman deserts, and embarks on a dangerous and lonely odyssey through the devastated South, heading home to North Carolina, and seeking only to be reunited with his beloved, Ada, who has herself been struggling to maintain the family farm she inherited. Cold Mountain is an unforgettable addition to the literature of one of the most important and transformational periods in American history.

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