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Thirteen Moons
Cover of Thirteen Moons
Thirteen Moons
A Novel
Borrow Borrow
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.
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.
Available formats-
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB eBook
Languages:-
Copies-
  • Available:
    1
  • Library copies:
    1
Levels-
  • ATOS:
    7.4
  • Lexile:
  • Interest Level:
    UG
  • Text Difficulty:
    6


Excerpts-
  • Chapter 1 Chapter 1

    bone moon

    1

    There is no scatheless rapture. love and time put me in this condition. I am leaving soon for the Nightland, where all the ghosts of men and animals yearn to travel. We’re called to it. I feel it pulling at me, same as everyone else. It is the last unmapped country, and a dark way getting there. A sorrowful path. And maybe not exactly Paradise at the end. The belief I’ ve acquired over a generous and nevertheless inadequate time on earth is that we arrive in the afterlife as broken as when we departed from the world. But, on the other hand, I’ve always enjoyed a journey.

    Cloudy days, I sit by the fire and talk nothing but Cherokee. Or else I sit silent with pen and paper, rendering the language into Sequoyah’s syllabary, the characters forming under my hand like hen- scratch hieroglyphs. On sunny days, I usually rock on the porch wrapped in a blanket and read and admire the vista. Many decades ago, when I built my farm out of raw land, I oriented the front of the house to aim west toward the highest range of mountains. It is a grand long view. The river and valley, and then the coves and blue ridges heaved up and ragged to the limits of eyesight.

    Bear and I once owned all the landscape visible from my porch and a great deal more. People claimed that in Old Europe our holdings would have been enough land to make a minor country. Now I have just the one little cove opening onto the river. The hideous new railroad, of which I own quite a few shares, runs through my front yard. The black trains come smoking along twice a day, and in the summer when the house windows are open, the help wipes the soot off the horizontal faces of furniture at least three times a week. On the other side of the river is a road that has been there as some form of passway since the time of elk and buffalo, both long since extinguished. Now, mules drawing wagons flare sideways in the traces when automobiles pass. I saw a pretty one go by the other day. Yellow as a canary and trimmed with polished brass. It had a windshield like an oversized monocle, and it went ripping by at a speed that must have been close to a mile a minute. The end of the driver’s red scarf flagged straight out behind him, three feet long. I hated the racket and the dust that hung in the air long after the automobile was gone. But if I was twenty, I’d probably be trying to find out where you buy one of those fast bastards.

    the night has become electrified. Midevening, May comes to my room. The turn of doorknob, click of bolt in hasp. The opening door casts a wedge of yellow hall light against the wall. Her slender dark hand twists the switch and closes the door. Not a word spoken. The brutal light is message enough. A clear glass bulb hangs in the center of the room from a cord of brown woven cloth. New wires run down the wall in an ugly metal conduit. The bare bulb’s little blazing filament burns an angry cloverleaf shape onto my eyeballs that will last until dawn. It’s either get up and shut off the electricity and light a candle to read by, or else be blinded.

    I get up and turn off the light.

    May is foolish enough to trust me with matches. I set fire to two tapers and prop a polished tin pie plate to reflect yellow light. The same way I lit book pages and notebook pages at a thousand campfires in the last century.

    I’m reading The Knight of the Cart, a story I’ve known since youth. Lancelot is waiting where I left him the last time. Still every bit as anguished and torn about whether to protect his precious honor or to climb onto the...
About the Author-
  • Charles Frazier grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. Cold Mountain, his highly acclaimed first novel, was an international bestseller, and won the National Book Award in 1997.
Reviews-
  • Publisher's Weekly

    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.

  • Library Journal

    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.

  • Booklist

    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.)

  • Newsweek "Gorgeous...Thirteen Moons calls Cold Mountain to mind in its wonder at the natural world; its pacificist undercurrents; its dismay at the dismantling of what matters, and its convication that one love, no matter how tortured and inexplicable, can be life-defining...fascinating...vivid and alive."
  • Kirkus Reviews, starred review "Thirteen Moons brings this vanished world thrillingly to life... One of the great Native American, and American stories, and a great gift to all of us, from one of our very best writers."
  • Asheville Citizen-Times "There are things so masterful words can't do them justice. Frazier's writing falls in that category...With Thirteen Moons, he's doing important work filling in the gaps, helping restore the roots, of our knowledge of our own history."
  • BookPage "Fascinating...Reading Thirteen Moons is an intoxicating experience...This is 21st-century literary fiction at its very best."
  • Los Angeles Times "Thirteen Moons is rare in many ways and occupies a literary plane of such height that reviewing it is not really salient....Thirteen Moons has the power to inspire great performances from succeeding generations of writers....For those who simply value the literary experience, Thirteen Moons will provide the immense satisfaction of taking a literary journey of magnitude. Whether on a plane, in an office or curled in a window seat, readers who absorb Will's story will find their own lives enriched....Thirteen Moons belongs to the ages."
  • USA Today "Magical...the history lesson in Thirteen Moons is fascinating and moving...You will find much to admire and savor in Thirteen Moons."
  • Atlanta Journal Constitution "Verdict: A powerhouse second act....a brilliant success...Frazier's second act should convince everyone that he's here to stay. It is a powerful, dramatic, often surprising and memorable novel."
  • Boston Globe "Thirteen Moons is a boisterous, confident novel that draws from the epic tradition... Frazier is a natural storyteller, and throughout his picaresque tale are grand themes and eulogies"
  • Seattle Times "Warm hearted...Frazier is a remarkably meticulous and tasteful writer... Thirteen Moons is a worthy successor to the first novel and a highly readable book."
  • Denver Post "To Charles Frazier, words are playthings. Like very few other contemporary American novelists, he puts them together in such a way that they can transform an otherwise mundane moment, scene or conversation into one that is transcendent....No sophomore jinx here. Reading a Frazier novel is like listening to a fine symphony. He's a maestro whose pen is his baton, beckoning the best that each sentence has to offer. And just as you wouldn't rush a conductor, you should take the time to savor Frazier's work, to take in each thought, to relish the turn of phrase or the imagery of a craftsman."
  • Raleigh News & Observer "Two for two...Here is a book brimming with vivid, adventurous incident...Charles Frazier set himself a daunting challenge with this book. He set out to write a historical novel that was retrospective and meditative, yet still vibrant and immediate with life. Thirteen Moons succeeds in classy fashion."
  • Newsday "If current fiction is anything to go by, it's hard for a novelist to make Santayana's puzzle pieces--lyricism, comedy, tragedy--fit together, as they do in real life and real history. Frazier has done it...Thirteen Moons makes you feel that change that happened so long before our own time, and makes you mourn it."
  • St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Thirteen Moons is a fitting successor to Cold Mountain...fans of Frazier's debut will be cheered to discover that the new book is another compulsively readable work of historical fiction."
  • Minneapolis Star Tribune "If there is any doubt that Frazier is an incredibly gifted storyteller--and not just a lucky name or a one-hit wonder--it will be put to rest with the publication of Thirteen Moons. Within 10 pages, this long-awaited new novel bears the reader swiftly out of the waking world into its own imagined universe like nothing else published this year."
  • Seattle Post-Intelligencer "Forget the sophomore jinx. Frazier demons
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    Random House Publishing Group
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