Cold Mountain - Charles Frazier

Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, the intrepid Ada is trying to revive her father’s derelict farm and learning to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away. As it interweaves their stories, Cold Mountain asserts itself as an authentic odyssey, hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving.

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Brace yourselves bookworms... I actually liked the movie better on this one. I know, I know! Wasn't wowed by the movie either, but compared to the novel... yeaaah... 

 

I picked this up largely because I love anything to do with Appalachian history and I live pretty near where this book takes place {There is an actual Cold Mountain, NC that you can actually hike up. No town there, just a mountain to climb, a pretty one at that!} I also remember being mildly entertained by the film adaptation years back. I feel like I've gone in so many homes of my neighbors & friends and have seen a copy of this somewhere on their shelves but rarely come across people who have actually read it. Even I had my copy sitting around for a couple years before finally getting around to it.. and now that I have, I'm sorry to say I was not impressed by this book. It just seemed SO unnecessarily verbose for the storyline. And slooooww. SO bogged down in pace.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel like the Civil War stories that have really wowed me were ones that were sparse in tone, just the right word chosen at every moment to really hit you in the gut. This one just seemed to go on...and on... and on but I didn't feel moved by anything. And not every moment has to be so damned profound. Sometimes the quiet of the mountains is nice because it's just quiet and your mind can be clear. The character doesn't have to constantly find inspiration for introspection, rehashing old moments that can't be redone. There was a good idea in this novel, but I feel like the storytelling was strangled out by the heavy-handed descriptions of freakin' EVERYTHING.

Also, maybe just me, but I am really irked by authors who think there is some edginess in using dashes in place of quotation marks (as done in this novel). Is it really so much more effort just to go with the quotation marks? They serve such a lovely purpose, you know. Much more so than the dash craze I see in so many modern novels. Just a personal pet peeve of mine.. moving on...