I just LOVED this book - best book I have read in a long time. Charles Frazier's style of writing is shear poetry... I first read Cold Mountain & loved that book so much that just had to get hold of this one and I was not disappointed.

"In prose filled with grace notes and trenchant asides, (Frazier) has reset much of The Odyssey in nineteenth century America, near the end of the Civil War..... A Whitmanesque foray into America : into its hugeness, its freshenss, its scope and its soul." ( The new york times book review).

Thanks for choosing this book from the General VBB.
Hope you enjoy it as much as I did....

Thank you for sending this book. I'm looking forward to reading it.

The life of Will Cooper, fictional character, from the time he is 12 until his early 90's. Will grows up in North Carolina, maybe a week's ride from the Cherokee nation, an orphan living with aunt and uncle. At 12 they contract him out to work at an outpost in the Cherokee Nation. They give him a horse, a key to the outpost, a little food and money. Will is frightened as you may imagine but he is quite capable; well-read, a decent gambler, a boy with his wits about him. He is taken under the wing of an older Indian man who adopts him as part of his clan. Will also falls in love before he even reaches the outpost when his horse gets stolen by an Indian named Featherstone and he goes to retrieve it. The girl is there on the property with his horse and Featherstone. Will remains in love with this girl, Claire, for the rest of his life. They have a history that you will have to read the book to understand.
The book is also about the Indians who lived on these lands, how most of them lost the lands and were gathered together and made to walk west 1,000 miles or so to a new Indian territory. President Jackson is ruthless in his determination to rid all the land east of the Mississipi of Indians. In the book Will and his Indian father Bear are successful in buying up land and holding on to it for Bear's people. This is correlated in real life. We also are witness to the destruction of environment; the hunting out of all the animals for their skins, the felling of huge forests of old hardwood. Both of these things are pretty hard to read about, disturbing. And it is interesting to read about the Indians in the South, I never really considered them in relation to the Civil War. There are some people in real life to google here: William Holland Thomas and the Indian Tsali as they bear some resemblance to the characters Will and Charley.

I am putting this book into the Native American book box.

Released into the American Indian book box which is on its way to Azuki.

I read this book back in 2008 and wrote the following:

Thirteen Moons creates a mood of wistful nostalgia for the fading days of the West (not the Wild West, but the area of the country we'd now call the Southeast) and the good ol' days when men were men, the wilderness was wild and life was colder harsher tougher better.

Frazier is very evocative but at times the book felt long. I would get drawn in, and then I would get impatient when things rolled along slowly. The narrator is reminiscing as an old man on the porch, with little to do but remember the past, and at times it drags and gets tedious.

I enjoyed the book, really. It's a wonderful story that encompasses the Jacksonian Era and the Civil War. Frazier reached into the past and fashioned a fireside yarn.

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This book enjoyed a brief stop in Boulder, UT before continuing its journey in Erishkigal's Native American bookbox.

Chosen from the Native American Book Box.

Beautifully written.

Left on the book shelf at Metropolitan Coffee.