Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

I really enjoyed Cold Mountain; it wasn't perfect, but I thought it was one of the best and most thought-provoking books I've read in quite a while--which was especially rewarding since I'd picked it up at the Walla Walla Goodwill for fifty cents!

Ostensibly a love story, albeit a nontraditional one, the tale is told in alternating chapters from the two protagonists' own concurrent, but not currently overlapping, lives. It is, at the same time, as much a love story to the land itself, with vivid descriptions of the south--and particularly the mountains of North Carolina. It was also original and enjoyable in its evocation of a bygone era through the language itself. I didn't, as it happens, look up any of the new words I encountered, but there were several--all descriptive of highly specific objects or actions--that I'd never come across before.

It also paints a vivid pictures of the struggle and reward of rustic farming, the horrors of the Civil War, and the power of the human spirit.

I'm finding it difficult to talk much about the book without spoilers, but I will say that I cried, and although I'm definitely a crier--especially, somehow, with books--it had been quite a while since one had gotten to me like this one did.

Highly recommended.