With the overwhelming success of his 1997 publication of Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier returns to the market with his sophomore work, Thirteen Moons. Lovers of the Appalachians, American Indian enthusiasts and those drawn to provocative storylines will be engulfed by Frazier’s prose and ability to craft a meaningful universe within 420 pages.

Beginning from the retrospective viewpoint of a man in his last days, Frazier tells the story of Will Cooper, a penniless orphan whose initial journey to the Cherokee Nation at the age of 12 shaped the entirety of his life and has brought him the edge of “Nightland, ” the Cherokee afterlife.

In the casual yet vigorous prose that marks much of his writing, Frazier’s protagonist expresses, “[We] arrive in the afterlife as broken as when we departed from the world. But, on the other hand, I’ve always enjoyed a journey.” With this statement, the journey premise establishes itself and prepares the reader for Will’s passage through a milieu of social and historical events.

Frazier strikes two opposing though not discordant notes with his rendering of detail and plot events—a romantic undertone mingles with the harsh realities of 19th century Indian politics and also with the complexities of human existence. He finds a delicate balance between poignant glorifications of the rapidly fading Cherokee world and the unstoppable political forces of nascent Washington City.

Storekeeper, land owner, businessman—Nick dabbles in each occupational identity while also transforming his ethnic and familial identity to Cherokee, an intriguing conversion that creates a variety of interesting situations and character interactions.

Frazier creates his usual cast of compelling characters, including the sympathetic Bear, the enigmatic Claire, and the intriguing Featherstone, with a variety of lesser figures as well. It’s inevitable to avoid comparison to Cold Mountain, and truthfully, these I found these dramatis personae lacking some of the vigor of the first novel’s characters. The love story marks itself by periods of distance and all-consuming passion, and I was convinced of its necessarily sad conclusion from its very inception. While one of Frazier’s strengths is using sadness to provoke contemplation within the characters and the reader, the love story was sad almost to the point of trite cliché.

The power of Frazier’s writing lies in his intermingling of short, choppy sentences with longer expressions of vivid detail. His syntax is sophisticated yet readable, and effectively expresses the presumably unfamiliar tenets of Cherokee spirituality and daily life. His sections in Washington City, though necessary for political and historical context, lack the poignancy of other parts of the book.

The historical events of the book mark the doom of the Cherokee Nation from the beginning and Frazier keeps the sadness of this at the forefront of each chapter, yet weaves in the necessary ribbon of hope as well. His concluding thoughts mark the finite nature of humanity by measuring human progress against a much larger scale: “black smoke settling over everything before the mountains form up again, shorn and damaged and eternal.” Simply put, despite our best efforts, nature is eternal and we are not—no matter the technological innovations that our century will produce.