Thirteen Moons

Starred review from August 28, 2006
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.

September 1, 2006
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 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2006
In one of the most anticipated novels of the current publishing season, Frezier, author of the widely applauded "Cold Mountain" (1997), remains true to the historical fiction vein. The author's second outing finds grounding in a timeless theme: a grand old man remembering his glory days. As a teenager during the James Monroe administration, Will Cooper is sent off, in an indentured situation, into the wilderness of the Indian Nation to run a trading post. From a mixed-race Indian, he wins a girl with whom he will be besotted for the rest of his life, and his passion will extend into personal involvement in Indian affairs, to the highest level of politics. Thus Frazier also remains faithful to the theme of his previous novel: the odyssey, especially one man's path through trials and tribulations to be by the side of the woman he loves. And he remains faithful to a method that marked "Cold Mountain" in readers' memories: a proliferation of detail about customs and costumes, about food and recreation--pretty much what everything looked and smelled like. Unfortunately, for the first fourth of the book, there is too much detail for the plot to easily bear. But, finally, the characters are able to step out from behind this blanket of particulars and incidentals and make the story work. Expect considerable demand, of course. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)