About.com Rating

• Nightwoods was published September 27, 2011
• Publisher: Random House
• 272 pages

I love a sharp dose of authenticity – when a story is told straight and fiction feels like reality. When you may have never been in a place or met anyone like the character you’re following, and yet you feel the narrative’s truth.

Charles Frazier has done it again. While Cold Mountain was a resounding success and a modern literary classic in this critic’s opinion, Thirteen Moons didn’t quite capture the same perfection though it did have its charms.

But Nightwoods. Nightwoods resounds with the tone of real people imbedding a place in time. This story breathes you in and holds its breath as the tension mounts and love mounts with it.

Luce lives in an old cabin across a lake that separates her from most human interaction. She is one apart and uncomfortable in her own skin due to a former violence against her. She is a dark beauty with a buried bleeding heart, finding solace in isolation. However, when her sister Lily is killed, her seemingly feral nephew and niece, Frank and Delores, are given to her to care for. They are mostly mute, unfeeling and have a penchant for playing with fire and watching things burn. Luce had an abusive mother, and yet finds there may be a motherly instinct stirring in her as days with the children turn into months.

However, without Luce’s knowing, her sister’s husband and murderer, Bud, has been released from jail. He begins bootlegging around the area and soon discovers where Luce is making home with his children – the witnesses and potential holders of some forgotten (or imagined) sum of his money.

His intentions are as devious and brutal as his act with Lily before.

You know where this story is going, but how you’re going to get there is where Frazier works new yeast into the dough that has become conventional thriller writing. The hunt is dark and slow, but every quote and description in building the 272 pages of this novel is the poetry of prose. The language is both stark and sumptuous. Cold and terror are the forest, and humor and tenderness fill the air between the trees. Some may find the darkness too much or the walk through it to ponderous, but Frazier’s light – Luce – is a character worth following to the end.

In fact, all of the terrorized main characters – Luce, Frank and Delores – embolden the reader to hope that they may survive. No less credit can be given than to the unassuming Stubblefield who comes to care for Luce and the children in the reader’s stead. Supporting characters including Luce’s father, a policeman who follows his own law to his own end, and Luce’s closest neighbor, an older woman with a rifle who knows her way with both abused humans and animals, are wonderfully drawn as well. The story pulls all of these people together and then mounts to a chase in the nightwoods as snow falls and fires burn. The elements clash. Blood is spilled. Creation is stirred. And restoration begins.

Nightwoods is perfect winter reading. The prose is mystifying, the setting hallucinatory. You won’t want to put this down as your dawn turns to dusk. And then the story will leave you too quickly, like a spontaneous break of warm moonlight during a fierce overcast night.

Want to think more deeply about Nightwoods? Use these book club discussion questions on Nightwoods to lead your reading group or to help you think about the novel.

Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.