Nightwoods
Ratings3
Average rating3.7
15
Ratings3
Average rating3.7
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Charles Frazier, the acclaimed author of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons, returns with a dazzling novel set in small-town North Carolina in the early 1960s. With his brilliant portrait of Luce, a young woman who inherits her murdered sister’s troubled twins, Frazier has created his most memorable heroine. Before the children, Luce was content with the reimbursements of the rich Appalachian landscape, choosing to live apart from the small community around her. But the coming of the children changes everything, cracking open her solitary life in difficult, hopeful, dangerous ways. In a lean, tight narrative, Nightwoods resonates with the timelessness of a great work of art. “Impossible to shake.”—Entertainment Weekly “Fantastic.”—The Washington Post “Astute and compassionate.”—The Boston Globe
Reviews with the most likes.
Charles Frazier is a master at crafting beautiful prose and bringing to life flawed but sympathetic characters. With “Nightwoods,” he does it again. Here Frazier is at his most stripped down, a bit less poetic and grandiose with more attention paid to the page-turning plot.
It's a story that pits modernity against the desire to retreat into the Appalachians and live in solitude on a lake with no electricity. It's a story of redemption for a young girl who was ostracized due to a tragedy for which she took the blame. And it's a story about taking small steps of growth – don't try to get a close personal connection right away; for starters just try to keep the kids from setting things on fire.
A faster read than Frazier's other novels, you'll spend more time worrying about Luce's safety than marveling at the beautiful descriptions of the mountains. Okay, you'll actually be doing both.
