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Thirteen Moons: A Novel

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Overview

This magnificent novel by one of America's finest writers is the epic of one man's remarkable journey, set in nineteenth-century America against the background of a vanishing people and a rich way of life. At the age of twelve, under the Wind moon, Will is given a horse, a key, and a map, and sent alone into the Indian Nation to run a trading post as a bound boy. It is during this time that he grows into a man, learning, as he does, of the raw power it takes to create a life, to find a home. In a card game with a white Indian named Featherstone, Will wins - for a brief moment - a mysterious girl named Claire, and his passion and desire for her spans this novel. As Will's destiny intertwines with the fate of the Cherokee Indians - including a Cherokee Chief named Bear - he learns how to fight and survive in the face of both nature and men, and eventually, under the Corn Tassel Moon, Will begins the fight against Washington City to preserve the Cherokee's homeland and culture.

Editorial Reviews

Frazier's long-awaited second novel ambles off to a slow start, crawls along at a turtle's pace, and reaches its destination after some torturous plotting and doubtful characterization. In a Horatio Alger tale with a twist, the orphaned Will Cooper is sold by his aunt and uncle as an indentured servant to a tradesman in the South Carolina mountains. At the rundown trading post he is supposed to manage, Will befriends an older Cherokee named Bear and adapts so well to Cherokee life that the tribe calls him the White Chief. Will accumulates money and property but unsuccessfully represents the Cherokees to the federal government when it decides to remove them from their lands. Finally, some mysterious strangers ride into town to collect their debts, and Will's empire comes tumbling down. A love story between Will and a Native woman runs throughout, but Will fails in love as he eventually fails in everything else. Much like Davy Crockett's story, this work gets more unbelievable as it goes on since Will appears Zelig-like in all the major events of 19th-century Cherokee history. The Natives are stock characters, Will himself lacks depth and complexity, and despite the time frame he speaks like a postmodernist: "And though I was moved by the poem that the deconstructed bird revealed." A tiresome novel, but most libraries will want a copy for fans of Frazier's Cold Mountain. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/06.]-Henry L. Carrigan Jr. Lancaster, PA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Charles Frazier

Charles Frazier was born in 1950 and grew up in western North Carolina. Frazier received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of North Carolina and his doctorate in American literature from the University of South Carolina. He taught at the University of Colorado and North Carolina State University before writing his first novel, Cold Mountain. He based the bestselling book on true stories written by his great-great-grandfather in journals during the Civil War period. Cold Mountain won the National Book Award.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Random House

Filesize

1.24 MB

Number of Pages

432

eBook ISBN

9781588365736

Excerpt from: Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier

Chapter 1 - PART ONE
bone moon
1
There is no scatheless rapture. love and time put me in this condition. I am leaving soon for the Nightland, where all the ghosts of men and animals yearn to travel. We're called to it. I feel it pulling at me, same as everyone else. It is the last unmapped country, and a dark way getting there. A sorrowful path. And maybe not exactly Paradise at the end. The belief I've acquired over a generous and nevertheless inadequate time on earth is that we arrive in the afterlife as broken as when we departed from the world. But, on the other hand, I've always enjoyed a journey.

Cloudy days, I sit by the fire and talk nothing but Cherokee. Or else I sit silent with pen and paper, rendering the language into Sequoyah's syllabary, the characters forming under my hand like hen- scratch hieroglyphs. On sunny days, I usually rock on the porch wrapped in a blanket and read and admire the vista. Many decades ago, when I built my farm out of raw land, I oriented the front of the house to aim west toward the highest range of mountains. It is a grand long view. The river and valley, and then the coves and blue ridges heaved up and ragged to the limits of eyesight.

Bear and I once owned all the landscape visible from my porch and a great deal more. People claimed that in Old Europe our holdings would have been enough land to make a minor country. Now I have just the one little cove opening onto the river. The hideous new railroad, of which I own quite a few shares, runs through my front yard. The black trains come smoking along twice a day, and in the summer when the house windows are open, the help wipes the soot off the horizontal faces of furniture at least three times a week. On the other side of the river is a road that has been there as some form of passway since the time of elk and buffalo, both long since extinguished. Now, mules drawing wagons flare sideways in the traces when automobiles pass. I saw a pretty one go by the other day. Yellow as a canary and trimmed with polished brass. It had a windshield like an oversized monocle, and it went ripping by at a speed that must have been close to a mile a minute. The end of the driver's red scarf flagged straight out behind him, three feet long. I hated the racket and the dust that hung in the air long after the automobile was gone. But if I was twenty, I'd probably be trying to find out where you buy one of those fast bastards.