Walking to Gatlinburg
A Novel
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
"A Civil War odyssey in the tradition of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Robert Olmstead’s Coal Black Horse, Mosher’s latest, about a Vermont teenager’s harrowing journey south to find his missing-in-action brother, is old-fashioned in the best sense of the word....The story of Morgan’s rite-of-passage through an American arcadia despoiled by war and slavery is an engrossing tale with mass appeal." –Publisher's Weekly
Morgan Kinneson is both hunter and hunted. The sharp-shooting 17-year-old from Kingdom County, Vermont, is determined to track down his brother Pilgrim, a doctor who has gone missing from the Union Army. But first Morgan must elude a group of murderous escaped convicts in pursuit of a mysterious stone that has fallen into his possession.
It’s 1864, and the country is in the grip of the bloodiest war in American history. Meanwhile, the Kinneson family has been quietly conducting passengers on the Underground Railroad from Vermont to the Canadian border. One snowy afternoon Morgan leaves an elderly fugitive named Jesse Moses in a mountainside cabin for a few hours so that he can track a moose to feed his family. In his absence, Jesse is murdered, and thus begins Morgan’s unforgettable trek south through an apocalyptic landscape of war and mayhem.
Along the way, Morgan encounters a fantastical array of characters, including a weeping elephant, a pacifist gunsmith, a woman who lives in a tree, a blind cobbler, and a beautiful and intriguing slave girl named Slidell who is the key to unlocking the mystery of the secret stone. At the same time, he wrestles with the choices that will ultimately define him – how to reconcile the laws of nature with religious faith, how to temper justice with mercy. Magical and wonderfully strange, Walking to Gatlinburg is both a thriller of the highest order and a heartbreaking odyssey into the heart of American darkness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Civil War odyssey in the tradition of Charles Frazier s Cold Mountain and Robert Olmstead s Coal Black Horse, Mosher s latest (after On Kingdom Mountain), about a Vermont teenager s harrowing journey south to find his missing-in-action brother, is old-fashioned in the best sense of the word. Seventeen-year-old Morgan Kinneson goes in search of his older brother, Pilgrim, a Union soldier reported MIA at Gettysburg. But first, Morgan accidentally causes the death of a runaway slave he was leading to safety in Canada. In the course of tracking down his missing brother, Morgan is pursued by slave catchers, accompanies an elephant on an Erie Canal showboat, visits the battlefield at Gettysburg, meets an escaped slave who turns out to be the dead slave s granddaughter, and gets wounded during a mountain feud before learning of Pilgrim s fate. Complicating matters is a rune stone the dead slave left to Morgan, which could compromise the security of the Underground Railroad if the slave catchers get their hands on it. The story of Morgan s rite-of-passage through an American arcadia despoiled by war and slavery is an engrossing tale with mass appeal.
Customer Reviews
A true American classic author
I have been a tremendous fan of Mr. Mosher's work. A few favorites are: In The Fall of The Year, Marie Blythe and waiting for Teddy Williams. Of course A Stranger in The Kingdom is a must read as well. All of the characters in Mr. Mosher's novels and short stories have terrific depth. A lot of it set in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Mr. Mosher makes the story and the settings come to life! If there is one criticism it is the books read so fast and come to an end too quickly leaving all of us waiting on the next novel to be released with great anticipation! Well done!