It's a rare 1st person narrator I enjoy keeping company with for over 400+ pgs. Other than Huck Finn, I'm having trouble thinking of notable exceptions (feel free to enlighten me with suggestions). In the case of Will Cooper, narrator of TM, he was entertaining, dramatic, witty and compellingly melancholic about half the time; the other half he was annoying, self-inflated, borderline whiny and just too damn talky. Frazier sets him up as a kind of Thoreauvian witness of America in the 19th c, focussing primarily on fate of the Cherokee. (though he drinks and romps naked in streams and steams with the steamy Claire way more than HDT) But Thoreau, for all his own opinionated and idealistic bombast, wears his considerable learning as lightly as the autumn leaves he loves to describe. Will, however, is forever reminding us that he likes to read Goethe by the river bank and whip up 5 Star Michelin banquets while astride his beloved horse, Waverly (Ok, that last jab was a wee bit exaggerated, but you see my point).

So why the 3 stars? CF is an engaging and vivid storyteller, especially when describing Indian life and the historical events surrounding the infamous Trail of Tears expulsion. And he's a marvelous stylist. The man can pen a sentence as lyrical and evocative as anyone writing today. He has a photographic eye for detail that is both astonishing and, at times, tiresome, as he describes everything -- and I do mean everything, no matter its significance -- with the same loving attention to detail. He clearly did an impressive amount of research, but seems bent on including all of it. And while this certainly creates an authentic world, it also just wears you down in places. I confess I skimmed some when I recognized he was about to launch into yet another passage of brilliant landscape description. I love the Transcendentalist's vision of nature as much as the next person, but sometimes you just want him to identify the trees and not zoom in on the state of every leaf and pine cone. Some descriptions, however, take your breath away: "I would put my hand under Waverly's blanket of wool batting and waxed canvas, and, no matter how bitter the night, touching his shoulder was like palming a loaf of bread fresh out of the oven."

The ongoing love saga between Will and Claire, though moving at first, became wearisome, and ultimately irrelevant to the larger story, I thought. (we should all be so lucky to have sex half that good in our 50s as well as in our 20s).

I understand that CF got a huge advance for this book, and with the weight of repeating the success of Cold Mountain on his shoulders, I got the impression he was just trying too hard to do too much in this book.