Rating: 
Summary: Read this book during the Hurricane
Review: I read this book with a flashlight during Hurricane Isabel. I could NOT put it down. I found the characters fascinating, complex and yet very easy to know. Frazier is able to bring life to his characters and you becoming sincerely invested in their emotions and their trials.I love that the women in this book are strong and yet feminine and conversely, the men are manly without being macho. There is a real yin and yang to this story. I especially enjoyed the alternating chapters going from Ada's point of view during the war to Inman's. Although there are some dry moments in the book, so as in real life, the overall story is gripping, emotionally charged and very realistic.
I recently went to see the film and was not at all disappointed by the conversion from book to movie. It was a delight although the subject matter is very grim at times and hard to watch. I think this book will become a classic. It has all of the ingredients of such- strong characters, a gripping tale, wonderful descriptions and the timeless, human need to return home. Touching, beautifully written- a real joy to experience. I have bought this book as a gift for a few friends because I feel it is more than a story. It is an experience.
Rating: 
Summary: Agonizingly Tedious.
Review: Individuals are obviously polarized regarding Cold Mountain. Reading it was as boring a chore as I've encountered in a long while with no redemption at this novel's end. Perhaps the movie is better; one can only hope.
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Summary: Superb Writing Style
Review: A terrific read. This is to the tragedy of the civil war what Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" was to the dust bowl and the depression years.
Rating:
Summary: Loved this book
Review: David Kusumoto has given such a wonderful and helpful review here. I have little to add except that I loved this book. I have read it once and listened to the audio tapes 3 times. Just saw the movie. It is a book to be savored. I wish I could have read David's review first.
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Summary: PLEASE Read...Tips to Conquering "Cold Mountain"
Review: I consider myself a pretty sophisticated reader. But I share many of the same sentiments others have about the titanic struggle to conquer "Cold Mountain." "Cold Mountain" has two primary stories. The first is about a wounded Civil War deserter named Inman who spends much of his time wandering home, facing obstacles to return to a beloved woman he hasn't seen in years. The second is about this beloved Ada and her friend Ruby, who transform the land upon which they live into a self-sufficient farm. Flashbacks recall things as they were between Inman and Ada before the war. These memories drive Inman home. Will he make it? If he does, will Ada remember? If she remembers, will she return his love? If these parallel stories intersect, will there be a good payoff? I wish what I've described was as simple as the book. "Cold Mountain" reads like a reflective diary with microscopic details that do little to drive this plot quickly forward. Worse, UNLIKE a diary, it's told in the third person. It's not, "I thought this" or "I did that." It's "Inman thought this" and "Ada felt that." Yet this isn't a dumb book. Ambitious, yes, but trash this isn't. But who wants to read something that feels like work? I wondered, "why am I torturing myself?" Just to prove I can do it because it won a big-time award? Just to be a pseudo-intellectual hot-shot? Of course I don't want an easy, dumbed-down read, but I don't want a biology, geology or botany lesson on every page. Yet I finished "Cold Mountain." So why am I still giving it four stars? First, some tips about how I got through it. Just like a mountain that can only be conquered in little steps, "Cold Mountain" requires, even for sophisticated readers, a level of concentration I haven't devoted to any book since college. Do NOT be distracted by noise, lest you be sent backward a few sentences or worse, a few paragraphs or pages. Savor the meaning of one sentence at a time. Go slow and read no more than one chapter per sitting. But keep at it. Don't stop in the middle of a chapter. You don't want to go back because you forgot where you left off. But if you start daydreaming about your job or a trip to the food court, stop. Using this "disciplined" method of tackling "Cold Mountain" - by the time I got about a quarter of the way through - I started discovering TWO reasons why this book achieves excellence, albeit the kind that will forever polarize readers, and rightly so. FIRST, "Cold Mountain" is a purposely challenging and romantic (yes it is), novel with many bloody, grimy and depressing details. It's difficult because it has none of the sentence structure with which we're accustomed. But my negative attitude began to shift when I realized the novel is written like an old museum relic, the only surviving account of thoughts from a random dead narrator from the 1860s. Author Charles Frazier has accomplished the near impossible, recreating a style of historic writing that feels as Greek as reading Jane Austen or Shakespeare for the first time. Everything animal, mineral and vegetable is given character. The mood is beyond melancholy, and there's danger around every corner. Nothing feels certain. SECOND, I began noticing, and not in any pretentious way, that every page in "Cold Mountain" had at least one or two nuggets of information made more beautiful through the eyes of a 19th century narrator ignorant of the 21st century. Stuff like: "All that night the aurora flamed - and (the men) vied to see - who could most convincingly render its meaning down into plain speech." "(Describing a mentally challenged young man): Everything he saw was (newly) minted, and thus every day was a parade of wonders." "(Inman as he inspects a freshly covered grave): If (there's) a world beyond the grave as (the) hymns claim, such a hole (seems) a grim and lonesome portal to it." I think most who dislike "Cold Mountain" are rightfully reacting to its tedious historical style and unconventional structure rather than the admittedly conventional story that lurks within its pages. But I also think, because I had the same negative reaction initially, that approaching this novel with more discipline, you might come away with greater respect for Frazier's ambitious effort to take a conventional romantic story and have it "re-told" - 19th century style - hence feeling unconventional compared to what's found in most present day bestsellers. It just stands out. I'm glad I gave it another shot.
Rating: 
Summary: Go See The Movie
Review: I started this book 3 times before I (FINALLY!) made it all the way through. With all due respect to Charles Frazier (writing anything is difficult), I did not like the book. Inman can't seem to make it home no matter what he does - in fact, he travels in reverse! Will he NEVER get there? Have you ever heard of quotation marks when someone speaks in a book?!? Of course the ending is depressing, can't have anything but that in "modern" fiction.
I heard the movie was "great!" Go see it and save your time.
Rating: 
Summary: Bloody but bloodless
Review: Frazier's prose immediately engaged me in his setting, but never in his two main characters. As others have noted, Inman and Ada seemed oddly detatched from that richly evoked time and place - and from each other - a flaw that detracted from my enjoyment of this otherwise worthy read. I am a tolerant, forgiving reader, but the overly-literary ambigous ending irritated me, particularly since I never had the chance to be convinced of the great transcendent love Inman and Ada supposedly shared. I can imagine that Law and Kidman, two brilliant but bloodless actors, do nothing to improve this flaw in the film. That being said, it is an engaging, textured read, with some marvelously drawn secondary characters (particularly Ruby and her father).
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Summary: American Literature at its Finest
Review: On the back cover of this novel there is a quote from the Washington Post. It says that this novel "is as close to greatness as an American novel is going to come these days" or something equally absurd and pretentious. I suppose whoever wrote that quote thinks that nothing great has come out of America since Faulkner died. Such a view is utterly dimwitted and snobbish, and if I were Charles Frazier, I would want it removed from my book jacket. This novel is American and it is greatness--the fact that it was written in the 1990s does not render the two qualities mutually exclusive. That quote is the only thing I can criticize about Cold Mountain. This book literally took my breath away. It is a beautiful story of two prickly people separated by war and holding on to each other's memory to bring them through hell on Earth. Ada is stranded on her father's farm after his death, without any skills concerning how to run such a place. Inman has deserted the confederacy, and is coming home to Ada and Cold Mountain through the peril of the Carolinas in 1864. Through the way, Inman meets people that personify the very best and the very worst that human nature has to offer. Ada sees the same while never leaving the Mountain. The characters of Ada and Inman are beautiful and rare. Apart from them, however, the characters of Ruby, Veasey, Sara, the goat woman, and a host of others are unique and wonderful. This book might be called a tragedy, but also contains many elements of the comic, supernatural, and historical. My descriptions cannot do this book justice. It must be read and savored, although I tore through the last 250 pages frantic to learn the ending. I believe that I will read this novel again and again to savor all of its magic properly. Yesterday I saw the film by the same name, which is quite different but also a beautiful work of art in its own right. While intriguing and wonderful, however, the film does not approach the level of greatness created by Charles Frazier in this modern day masterpiece.
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Summary: Visualized Beautifully on Screen
Review: Cold Mountain is a fascinating and beautifully written book, but the movie is better. Even though the ending is disappointing in both (the movie stays true to the book) or maybe I should just say sad, the journeys of Inman and Ada are worth the trip. I felt more emotional attachment to the characters in the movie than I did in the book. Jude Law, Nicole Kidman and Renee Zelweger, plus all the supporting characters, bring Frazier's characters to life for me in a way the book never did. A friend called the movie a "chick flick" just because love is a central theme, but I totally disagree. And the "message" of both the book and the movie goes much deeper than the usual "war is hell." If you haven't read the book yet, I recommend you see the movie first. But by all means, do both. See the movie AND read the book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent...and disappointing
Review: Charles Frazier's first novel is literally gorgeous. His story of two separated and uncertain southern lovers and their survival and personal growth during the lean Civil War years is excellent, but what really makes this book so great is its imagery. Frazier paints Ada and Inman's mountain territory with a loving and detailed hand, so well-drawn that ALL your senses are engaged throughout the novel. Yet this is no Conrad-style monotonously descriptive work. Against the living tapestry of the mountains, the main story of Ada and Inman (the lovers) and the people they meet along their journeys is drawn with equal skill, and the book is truly a difficult one to put down. It explores the range of human emotion, tying that in with the themes and seasons of the natural world; both of those things are a constant presence in the story. The disappointment comes at the end, which I will not reveal. Suffice it to say that it is probably part of what makes the book (and the movie) such powerful potential award-winners, but I did not care for it, and it decreased my enjoyment of a book otherwise well-worth savoring on long afternoons from your front porch.
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