Thirteen Moons
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3.7 • 6 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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. And he will come to know the truth behind his belief that “only desire trumps time.”
Brilliantly imagined, written with great power and beauty by a master of American fiction, Thirteen Moons is a stunning novel about a man’s passion for a woman, and how loss, longing and love can shape a man’s destiny over the many moons of a life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When Frazier's debut Cold Mountain blossomed into a National Book Award winning bestseller with four million copies in print, expectations for the follow-up rose almost immediately. A decade later, the good news is that Frazier's storytelling prowess doesn't falter in this sophomore effort, a bountiful literary panorama again set primarily in North Carolina's Great Smoky Mountains. The story takes place mostly before the Civil War this time, and it is epic in scope. With pristine prose that's often wry, Frazier brings a rough-and-tumble pioneer past magnificently to life, indicts America with painful bluntness for the betrayal of its native people and recounts a romance rife with sadness. In a departure from Cold Mountain's Inman, Will Cooper narrates his own story in retrospect, beginning with his days as an orphaned, literate "bound boy" who is dispatched to run a musty trading post at the edge of the Cherokee Nation. Nearly nine mesmerizing decades later, Will is an eccentric elder of great accomplishments and gargantuan failures, perched cantankerously on his front porch taking potshots at passenger trains rumbling across his property (he owns "quite a few" shares of the railroad). Over the years, Will modeled very loosely, Frazier acknowledges, on real-life frontiersman William Holland Thomas becomes a prosperous merchant, a self-taught lawyer and a state senator; he's adopted by a Cherokee elder and later leads the clan as a white Indian chief; he bears terrible witness to the 1838 1839 Trail of Tears; a quarter-century later, he goes to battle for the Confederacy as a self-anointed colonel, leading a mostly Indian force with a "legion of lawyers and bookkeepers and shop clerks" as officers; as time passes, his life intersects with such figures as Davy Crockett, Sen. John C. Calhoun and President Andrew Jackson. After the Civil War, Will fritters away a fortune through wanderlust, neglect and unquenched longing for his one true love, Claire, a girl he won in a card game when they were both 12, wooed for two erotic summers in his teen years and found again several decades later. In the novel's wistful coda, recalling Claire's voice inflicts "flesh wounds of memory, painful but inconclusive" a voice that an uncertain old Will hears in the static hiss when he answers his newfangled phone in the book's opening pages. The history that Frazier hauntingly unwinds through Will is as melodic as it is melancholy, but the sublime love story is the narrative's true heart.
Customer Reviews
Good first half, exhausting and pointless in the second
I understand what the author was going for with the increasing cynicism due to Will’s eventual adjustment into the government’s rules and culture but the book exhausted me halfway through. Will is very flawed and that’s fine, except he never really seems to learn from his mistakes and gets off death too easy for his actions and is reduced to a petty rambling old man.
Nice vivid descriptions of the world and brief flashes of beautiful romance, but despite how much overbearing change occurs, Will himself is egotistical and a player who by the end you hope is met with a deserving demise for the sheer fact that despite his deeds, he is outright a disgusting human being who gets away with lies and escaping his responsibilities.
Furthermore, Claire is more of an enigma who deserved much better development than being primarily an outlet for the author to write about sex.
While I completely am in agreement with what the whites in the story did being bad, the constant barrage of complaints of European culture is exhaustive and barring rational moments of discourse and reflection in the story such as the army taking the Indigenous from their homes, it becomes a text of an old man who in arrogance yells in your ear his superiority to everything else. Again such moments are by themselves are appropriate since this is a first person narrative but it demands much paraphrasing (which I guess I unironically didn’t do here)
4/10
Read Cold Mountain instead. Or if you’re inclined for better Indigenous literature in general, Wendy Hill’s Peaceful Relationships.