Thirteen Moons

Charles Frazier has followed up the phenomenal success of his historical novel, Cold Mountain, with another book set in the hills of western North Carolina. This time he has focused on a different aspect of the region--the Cherokee Indian, and the removal of such during the Jackson administration. He has told the stories through the eyes of a white man, who is looking back in his old age.

Will Cooper was thirteen and an orphan when he was bound by his aunt and uncle to a merchant as the clerk in a trading post on the edge of the boundary with the Cherokee Nation. The time would have been about 1820, and Cooper has nothing but a faithful horse and some books. He quickly becomes friend with the local chief, Bear, who eventually adopts him and he is accepted into the clan. From then on, he fights tirelessly to keep his adopted people from being ill-treated by the ever-expanding white civilization of America. He also spends his whole life pining for a woman, a part-white, part-Cherokee woman named Claire.

Although I appreciated getting a look at a time and place I didn't know much about, Frazier, apparently letting accolades about his first book go to his head, has written a meandering and frequently lazy book. I enjoyed the beginning, when Cooper is a boy and has some big-sized adventures, even though I should have known what I was in for with the first sentence: "There is no scatheless rapture." Even after reading the entire novel, this line is so inscrutable I still don't know what it means. The story unfolds in herks and jerks, at times settling in on details about real estate and bad debts, which is not exactly page-turning. Transitions from chapter to chapter are frequently chasmal. Frazier utilizes his narrator as unreliable, who won't tell us everything, and at one point, describing a dual he has with another father figure, he tells three versions of the story, and asks us to pick the one that we like.

Also, this book leaves some major history outside its borders. When the removal of the Cherokee comes, leading to what is known as the Trail of Tears, Cooper stays behind, his beloved Claire going west. I suppose Frazier acknowledges that there might be enough literature about that event in history, and he wants to tell us about the Cherokees who stayed, but in seems like the readers have been short-changed.

Frazier writes in a florid, romantic style, because that book is at heart a love story, not a history lesson, though the love described, though life-long on Cooper's part, is unsatifactorily fulfilled. There are a lot of gooey passages and descriptions of connubial bliss in streams, which veer dangerously close to romance novel boilerplate. I admired Cold Mountain for it's history and its romance, but Thirteen Moons falls short of the mark in both areas.