Rating: 
Summary: For thoughtful readers
Review: How unfortunate it is that many of the reviews listed below are by junior and senior high school students, forced to read the book as an assignment for class. This brilliant work requires a readers with the patience and imagination to sink into the pages and let the beauty of the language and the vividness of the images wash over them. Frazier's unique style of writing (and particularly his way with dialogue) requires some getting used to, and it took me about 75 pages to become engrossed in the story. I found the rather flat, understated tone to be helful in some cases, where the fully-described violence of the image could otherwise be overwhelming. In other instances, his style gives leave to the reader to absorb the impact of the story twists and turns slowly, leaving much to think about after putting the book down and getting on with life. Other reviewers are correct to suggest reading just a chapter or two at a time; you will find your mind returning again and again to thoughts of the chapter you have just finished. It's been several days since I finished the book and I still can't get it out of my mind. Although set in the Civil War, the plot is really timeless. I thoroughly recommend this book to readers who aren't just interested in an immediate impact, but enjoy stories that leave a lasting impression and require some thought.
Rating: 
Summary: Overwritten, pretentious, ponderous
Review: This much-acclaimed first novel but Charles Frazier follows two plot threads. In the one, Civil War Confederate soldier Inman (we never learn his first name) deserts his hospital bed while recovering from yet another wound, and begins the long trek back to Cold Mountain, where his lady love awaits him. The other thread involves the aforementioned lady love, Ada, who has a farm she doesn't know how to care for. She acquires an assistant, a young homeless woman named Ruby who's been wandering the hills, but knows more about farming. Together they work the farm, waiting for Inman. Sounds like a promising premise for a novel, doesn't it? I'm a Civil War buff who enjoys historical novels, and serious fiction (though not much of the modern stuff, to be honest) and so I thought that it would be a perfect fit for me. I have even been told how good it was by people I've met at parties and so forth. So I had to read it. And boy was I disappointed. For one thing, Frazier has decided to write the novel in a strange fashion, apparently attempting to create atmosphere. This has led to several strange choices: an overbearing, leaden tone to the prose, and the omission of quotation marks in the text. The latter leads to passages like the following: The light soon fell too grey to read. A pair of bobwhites called their identical three-word messages back and forth from the field to the woods. Ruby rose and said, I better get on. The last four words of that paragraph are spoken. What's the point to deleting the quotation marks and separating them from the rest of the text? It looks to me like the author is attempting to show how literary he is or something. If a paragraph begins with dialog, he starts it with a dash, but otherwise, you have to pay very careful attention. There's a passage later in the book (too long to reproduce here) where you're not sure where Inman stops speaking and the narrator starts, though Inman is I in one part of the paragraph and he in another. Then there's the issue of "authenticity." Frazier clearly knows something about the Civil War, and he's done some research which has led him to make some interesting choices in the novel: the way characters speak, the things they carry, the opinions they express. One very interesting thing (which the author only touches on briefly a couple of times) is that Inman doesn't idolize Lee, and admires Longstreet more. That's not something you would get from most history books (though it's entirely possible, especially for a soldier not from Virginia) and it's refreshing a bit. On the other hand, there's the issue of the guns. In the first passage of the book where we actually see the name of a firearm, it's a Whitworth sniper rifle. It turns out that the gun is (apparently) owned by a Home Guard soldier who winds up chasing Inman. Whitworths were extremely rare, delicate, expensive weapons, and the idea of one in the hands of a Home Guard part-time soldier is something of a stretch of imagination for someone who knows something about the Civil War. For one thing, the ammunition would be hard to obtain (you couldn't make your own, as you could with many other weapons of the era) and for another it would be very difficult to care for, and you certainly wouldn't lean it against a wall outside a store (where we see it first) so that someone could fiddle with it or steal it. Later, we learn that Inman himself has a LeMat, an exotic pistol known as the "grapeshot gun" because of its shotgun barrel mounted below the regular pistol barrel. The author knows enough to make Inman's one of the better ones made in Britain, and though they were rare, it's not that much of a stretch. But later, when we meet the villain, the leader of the Home Guard, he has a Spencer repeating rifle. By now I've lost all hope of this being realistic, and the Spencer finished things off for me. Again, ammunition would have been an issue (the Spencer fires copper cartridges, which the South couldn't manufacture) and those that were captured were put in the hands of sharpshooters with carefully hoarded ammunition. The novel does have a weary, careworn air about it that suggests that the characters have been through three years of war, and that's at least authentic. As I've shown, some of the details are suspect, though, so it's safe to say this: the more one knows about the Civil War in particular, the less authentic this novel will seem. The novel has many pretentions though, attempting to be very literary and sophisticated. I believe it mostly fails, but others here think it succeeded. The parallels to Homer are obvious, and if you don't get them yourself, the author helpfully has Ada read the Oddyssey to Ruby early in the book, to make sure you get the reference yourself. Might as well have hit me over the head with Homer himself. I don't like writing that's self-conciously sophisticated. I've read Conrad, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Jane Austen, Chaim Potok, Patrick O'Brian. I'm not a fan of modern literature, and since I suppose this book is aspiring to fit into that category, along with Updike and Vonnegut and so forth. I wish the author luck, but I'm not going to read anything else by the man. This was a big disappointment.
Rating: 
Summary: Not worth the time
Review: There is much that one could say about Cold Mountain. As a winner of the National Book Award, it certainly has something praiseworthy in it's prose. Individually, the chapters are written in a lyrical way, with stunning detail that evokes the intentionally grim mood of the book. Of the plot, there is precious little to say, for there is precious little plot at all. Inman is on a journey home, on foot, after desserting the army during the Civil War. On the way, he encounters endless trials to the point of ridiculousness. While this is clearly an attempted to homage to The Odyssey, it doesn't come off well in this book, and simply makes Cold Mountain look worse for the comparison. Ada, Inman's sweetheart prior to the war and ultimate goal of his journey, has inherited a non-working farm from her recently deceased father. Now she struggles, ala Sally Field in Places in the Heart. Ada's story is considerably more interesting than Inman's and provides the only attempt at plot that will draw the reader in at all. The form and pacing of Cold Mountain may be of interest to some readers. The book starts off painfully slow, actually picks up speed in the middle, and then comes to an abrupt end. While I don't typically like to give readers the ending, I will here (for those who care to read it). Near the end, Inman suddenly is home and finds Ada. They spend one passionate, snowed-in night together, and then Inman gets himself killed by soldiers looking for desserters. This ending is typical of so many modern authors who use literary devices not to effect, but because they can. In this story, it serves no purpose but to make the reader feels as if the author is saying to them "so there, hah!", like a small child. While Cold Mountain certainly has some well written and lovely prose, it is overall not worth the time. If a reader is interested in a journey, then get the real Odyessy, and skip this sad imitation. If you do decide to give Cold Mountain a shot, be forewarned that you will have to give it at least 100 pages before you can begin to feel invested in this book (and one really isn't sure if you are invested in the story, or the 100 pages that you have already read) and it will not end happily.
Rating:
Summary: Cold Feelings from the Mountain
Review: I was a little disapointed in this National Book Award winner. Overall the story was simple, but interesting. I was extremely put off by the grisly images of slaughter that seemed to occur every ten pages (or less). I think that Frazier could have accomplished his novel without having to go into such gory details of how a goat, pig, chicken, turkey, bear, bull, and person are killed. I know that this time period calls for this sort of relevance, but it really detracted from the novel. I found myself feeling ill and skipping whole pages to avoid having to read about "festering entrails."
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Not once could I picture the hero and heroine as having been residents of the Western Carolinas in the 1860s. Their sensibilities were mired too firmly in the late 20th century. While this which probably explains the great commercial appeal of this historical trifle, it is not what I expected from a highly rated historical novel. The hero is supposed to be a native of the area. Well, he must sprung full grown out of someone's cabbage patch, for not once in his extensive recollections while trekking back to his true love did he recall a mother, a father, siblings, aunt, uncles, cousins, his early childhood education, etc. How he came both to his letters and to a value system oddly similar to contemporary New Age spiritual claptrap remains a mystery to this reader. As for the heroine, she came across more as a neurotic yuppie commitment-phobe than the daughter of an affluent widowed preacher of the American Transcendentalist school. The descriptions of flora and fauna do shine, and some of the other characters are quite vivid, but from all the hype, I was hoping for a far better book
Rating:
Summary: Best Read in Last 10 years
Review: An incredibly well researched odyssey of a late civil war wounded confederate soldier leaving the hospital and the war behind and walking across the Appalachians to home in Cold Mountain at the far western tip of North Carolina.
The language and terminology immerse the reader as if doing time travel... The descriptions of the world are beyond poetry even... The story is really about a young couple, the girl at home and her travails, and the ravaged veteran of too many bloodfights struggling to avoid capture and to survive in a collapsing Confederacy. We learn a lot about what went into Ada the female protagonist and how she develops and about her nature-girl friend, Ruby, and who she is, but the male protagonist, Inman, just is what he is without heroics nor pretention but with gradually emerging depth of character as he encounters real characters more frightening than those with which Ulysses was faced.
Inman, IMHO, is the ultimate Taoist... knowing much, saying little, doing what needs to be done and not apologising...
This book won the National Book Award and was deservedly on the NY Times best seller list for 45 weeks running when it was first published.
I personally rate it as the best book I have read in at least ten years and I read two or three books a week.
Rating:
Summary: Look at the old reviews first
Review: There are over 1200 reviews for this book already. I'm sure many of us read this book because of the upcoming movie starring Judd Law and Nicole Kidman. (I did). The average review for this book is only 3.5 stars. But if you look at the old reviews first you'll see that back in '97 when nobody knew about the film version most people were giving it 5 stars. I must admit this book started slow for me. I don't read a whole lot of fiction and when I do it's mostly John Grisham type stuff. But I spotted this film on a movie web site and it looked interesting so I thought I'd give it a try. This book was excellent. Like other reviewers have mentioned, the scenery is very rich and detailed. And the book really does flow like a poem. Which makes sense because one of Frazier's inspirations was The Odyssey. I'm not one for long reviews so I'll just say this. If you're at all interested in a this fine novel, read it. Or... go see the movie on XMAS. The buzz is that it's an Oscar contender :-)
Rating:
Summary: Just Read It
Review: Foremost, this book left me all the more resolved to experience life -- to take advantage of the oportunities to really live as they appear. It made me wish that Mr Frazier had already authored a body of similar work I could dip into and draw more from. This is a book about living in our world of connection to those things around us. The author excels at the parsimonious use of language to engage all senses and so bring the tale into the reader's reality. His descriptive language of scent and aroma in particular evoked memory in alternately vivid and shocking fashion. What a gift and skill! Read the book, and read it all.
Rating: 
Summary: A great read!!
Review: Even though it's about the civil war, it's not a bore. Frazier sucks you into the world of Inman, a Union soldier, and Ada, a girl trying to get by after her father dies. The book is about Inman's long, hard journey to and over Cold Mountain, where he lived before his world was changed forever. After deciding fighting in the war isn't worth it and leaving the hospital ward, he plans to go back to Ada, whom he had loved five years before. He can only hope that she feels the same way. The book switches back and forth from Inman to Ada, living on her father's farm. This book is very well written and thought out. The characters' emotions are your own, and you are living the story with them. The subject is complex, dark, and gloomy, but I couldn't stop reading. If you want a happy book with a predictable ending, don't bother even reading page one. Frazier's novel is about the pains of war, hardship, and despair. The end is definitely the best part, since it is the result of what the characters have been working hard for since the beginning of the story. A little slow at the start, but don't give up reading. The movie of this book comes out in December with Jude Law playing Inman. Personally, there's no way the movie could top the book, or even come close. "Cold Mountain" is the best book I have ever read. If you have some time, want to take on a challenge, and want something new, this book is for you. Frazier has a great talent for writing. (You can read this review and say that the book's all mushy, but until you read it, you won't know about the action or how gory it is.)
Rating:
Summary: Deeply rewarding
Review: Gorgeously written and evocative of a bygone time and place...Charles Frazier's novel of a Confederate soldier returning home to the woman he loves is filled with rich period detail and an attention to the subtle nuances of everyday human experience. Although anecdotal in its narrative structure, the sum of each part adds up to a satisfying - and quite surprising - whole. The book requires patience and, as several readers here have remarked, is best read in one or two chapter sittings. This is certainly one of the best American novels of the past ten years. Anthony Minghella's got a terrific cast and crew behind the upcoming and eagerly anticipated film version. I'll be first in line at the box office.
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