Book Review: Cold Mountain

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book was a little racy for my taste, especially in the middle. There was a lot of inappropriate sexual content...at least for my pretty sheltered mind. I don't tend to like the slow going pace, and this book was especially slow at first, but I am glad I persevered as the author did a good job of portraying the horrors of the Civil War. I guess slow going reading favors the period of time that the book depicts.

I saw into a window of the lives of backwoods people in The Appalachians, but a lot of the time it was a window that I would have liked to walk away from to pretend it was not there. I don't like some of the oddities of the people portrayed, especially as a Tennesseean. It's books like this that make some people think we are still all barefoot and pregnant living off the hog and our veggie gardens. I am sure much of what is talked about it true, but I just don't like it...maybe that makes me a fool, but I would rather pretend stuff like incest doesn't exist in the world as I know it. Sometimes I felt like I was reading an awkward story that was the frame for the awkward movie Oh Brother Where Art Thou.

I really enjoyed reading about the art of homesteading and the author's beautiful and sometimes very detailed descriptions of nature, especially our own gorgeous Appalachian Mountains.

My favorite line by far was the old goat lady who said, "Marrying a woman for her beauty makes as much sense as eating a bird for it's song."

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