Charles Frazier is back with ‘Thirteen Moons’

updated 10:10 p.m. ET Oct. 3, 2006

RALEIGH, N.C. - It wasn’t enough for Cindy Farrar to be among the first people Tuesday to buy a copy of Charles Frazier’s new book, “Thirteen Moons.”

The lab technician from Wilmington also decided to take two days off from work to make sure she properly enjoyed the new novel by the author of “Cold Mountain.” She also bought a copy on CD.

“I’ve been looking forward to this for months,” she said.

Nearly a decade after the release of “Cold Mountain,” a debut novel that sold 4 million copies and became a big-budget Hollywood movie that included an Academy Award winning performance by Renee Zellweger, Frazier made his highly anticipated return to bookstores Tuesday with the release of “Thirteen Moons.”

Farrar was among the hundreds of fans who gathered Tuesday night to hear Frazier read from the book at Meredith College, the first stop on a 15-city tour. It was a homecoming of sorts for the 55-year-old Frazier, who lived nearby before quitting his teaching job at North Carolina State University to finish “Cold Mountain.”

It took Frazier seven years to finish that book, and following its 1997 release, the hardback and paperback versions spent a combined 94 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The success led Random House to give Frazier an $8 million advance for “Thirteen Moons.”

The novel is the story of Will Cooper, an orphaned white man who runs a trading post in the wilderness of the Cherokee nation. A Cherokee elder adopts Cooper, who eventually becomes a tribal chief. He meets his true love, Claire, when he wins her in a card game at age 12, then finds her again decades later.

“It’s a life story,” Frazier said Tuesday night. “I wanted this book to be a lot of things, and part of it is Will’s connection to another culture and his sense of beholdeness to another culture. Another is a sense of America in the 19th century and the really grand goals we had as a nation.”

Reviews have been mixed. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly said, “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 Associated Press said that “Frazier is constantly overwriting, ladling on far too many side plots and embarrassing everyone with love scenes in which Will and Claire go ’at each other with incandescent yearning, all the bleak hopefulness of youth manifested in our grasping and clashing.”’

Of course, none of that mattered Tuesday to fans such as Farrar, whose trip to Raleigh included a chance encounter with Frazier outside a bookstore where she picked up her reserved copy of the book.

“I shook his hand. It’s like he’s a celebrity,” she said. “He was very nice, but kind of quiet. I didn’t want to impose on him.”

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