This is a completely honest zone here on my blog, so with that being said I have to admit that I did not enjoy

Cold Mountain

nearly as much as I did

Mudbound

. I realized fairly early on that this book wasn’t quite clicking with me in the same way the last one had, and it had some trouble keeping me engaged and interested. I would find my mind wondering halfway down the page and have to reread it. I had to really force myself to get any work at all done which was the complete opposite of

Mudbound

which I had to be forcible torn away from by my parents during vacation. I even tried one of my little tricks to get more interested in the book reading. My little trick only works with books that have already been made into a movie adaptation though. I like to watch the movies of books before reading them then read the actual book and then re-watch the movie. I like doing it this way because you can enjoy the movie as its own work without nitpicking every detail that doesn’t follow the book exactly or just wasn’t as good as you wanted it to be. Also, you can still have fun reading the book because, as we all know too well, movies don’t always stay completely true to the source material (sometimes they completely delete whole characters and mess up important events). Finally, you can then re-watch the movie just for the fun of ruining it with all the knowledge of the book. Unfortunately, not even this trick worked for me like it had in the past because even the movie seemed uninteresting to me. Twenty minutes in and I literally fell asleep. After that I really had to just suck it up and trudge through like some tiresome chore that needed to be done. It felt like ages before I finished this novel.

Let’s start the discussion with my first impression of

Cold Mountain

. I started it not long after I finished

Mudbound

(maybe a week or so after because I was waiting for Amazon to ship my copy to me… shout out to Amazon, I guess). When I did eventually get it and cracked it open to the first chapter, “the shadow of a crow”, I was introduced to Inman and his world. One of the very first things that I noticed about the way Charles Frazier wrote was how descriptive he could be. Every single thing that he mentioned you could clearly see in your mind’s eye. Sometimes you don’t even really need to know these details but there they were to slow you down. It also became apparent that he did something I’ve never seen before to show when characters were speaking. Frazier didn’t use quotations around dialogue at all in this book! If he wasn’t using “he said” or “she said” he would distinguish the spoken words with a “-” and separate the lines of different speakers like you normally would if you were using quotations. I don’t really understand why he choose this way of doing it rather than just give us readers a break and use quotation marks. If someone has even the slightest clue as to why he choose to do it this way please leave a comment below for me. It’s become one of those things that I just can’t stop thinking about.

It was looking back writing this that I also made the connection between Inman’s book, Bartram’s Travels, is that both that book (which I later learned is an actual book written around 1770’s) and Cold Mountain aren’t exactly linear. Inman didn’t have to read Bartram’s Travels in order because “it was not a book that required following from front to back.” I think the author felt like a story doesn’t necessarily need to be told from the exact beginning. Why do this when flashbacks, right? Events you read in Cold Mountain sometimes skips around a lot and don’t go from point A to point B to point C. Sometimes it opens at point B then a flashback to point A and before you realize it its point C. That’s just a little thing I thought may be a connection.

Let me just say before we get rolling here that I have never even heard of Mudbound before being assigned with this summer reading, but I knew the likelihood of it being a good read were pretty high considering we were assigned with it to begin with. I almost never dislike school books with True Grit being the only exception (I just could not for the life of me bring myself to like the protagonist in that novel at all!). However, in my opinion, Mudbound‘s characters certainly did not have a problem winning my favor! I loved every one of the characters Hilary Jordan brings to life in her pages (every one of them that is but one… I’m looking at you, Pappy). While none of them were exceptionally “good” people, I couldn’t help but wish they could all just be happy in the end. Of course that didn’t exactly happen to some of them.

The most gut wrenching scene in the whole book for me was the time Ronsel spent on that stormy night at the old sawmill. I had goosebumps the entire time. Ronsel is by far my favorite character and to have him be in such a dangerous situation, surrounded by those disgusting, horrible, hateful people had me filled with worry that he would meet an early grave! I could see him there, kneeling on that dirty floor, arms and legs bound and neck choked with a rope noose. I never realized just how much you can truly detest a fictional person until this band of deplorable men in their makeshift KKK hoods were about to kill a man for nothing more than a deeply rooted hate for the color of his skin. I had wished Jamie had taken that shot at Pappy when he made his attempted rescue, but I suppose Pappy got what was coming to him in the end anyways. To be killed in arguably the most hands-on and “up close” way possible by your own son, who you had declared yourself to not “have the balls to kill a man up close,” is just the medicine he deserved. Unfortunately, killing Pappy cannot undo what was done. Ronsel still has to live without a tongue. Hap and Florence have to see their beloved son suffer and hurt from his new disability. Jamie still has to cope with the fact that he had a hand in having this whole ordeal happen.

Racism in the South is one of the novel’s main themes, and it isn’t just portrayed in these obvious and violent scenes like at the sawmill. What I liked about this book is how it also managed to capture the more subtle, complex forms racism can take. Hilary Jordan tries to show how the entire system in these times were built to specifically keep these people down and make it almost impossible for them to move prosper. Even though they were a “freed,” people, they still have to work tirelessly to simply maintain their lot in life. You might as well kiss your freedom good by if you even get a sliver of debt because it only builds from there thanks to the crop sharing system. Even when they do great things like serve in the military during war (which if they had been a different color would have made them celebrated heroes) they were belittled and treated like they were trash. The only good you could do was to shut up and obey what you were told. It makes me sick thinking this really was how many people thought at that point of time. It makes me even sicker to think that some people today still have a similar way of thinking today. I have family that lives in the deep South where many of their neighbors are farmers like McAllen family was. While I don’t they they themselves think they were racist, I couldn’t help but notice those subtle things they sometimes unconsciously did. I would like to think they don’t actually think the neighborhood was going downhill when a new family that happens to be black moves in nearby. I would like to think they don’t actually think that this new family was secretly selling drugs on the side without even meeting them before. I would love to think that one of their friends didn’t really openly use the n word in such a casual way while talking about them (even though I was literally sitting right across the table from that old man while at little Jimmy’s 9^th birthday party).I would like to think they don’t really think any plain old guy walking past them on the street was going to mug them just because he was darker than them. I would really like to believe that that part of my family wasn’t acting and thinking in such a toxic way, but that was the way they were raised. The same way Pappy, Henry, and Laura were raised (though during their time racism was much more open and potent). I can’t help but feel like whenever I see them acting this way again (which is undoubtable) that I’ll see a shadow of Pappy over their shoulders. I should really recommend this book to them.

All in all, I loved this book a lot. It certainly helped eat up sometime while on some of these road trips I’ve taken over the summer. I was excited to learn that the author, Hilary Jordan, is actually working on a sequel to Mudbound! (SOURCE) It’s supposed to drop sometime this fall according to her, which I suppose is the reason Mudbound was chosen for us to read. Apparently the sequel’s protagonist is the son Ronsel had with Resl in Germany during his military service. I’m anticipating the day it comes out with bated breath! Even if we don’t end up reading it in class you can bet on me reading it as soon as I can get my hands on it!

Hello! I’m Mya, and if you couldn’t tell already, I’m really into art and drawing. I chose to do this short visual comic because I got majorly stuck when I tried my first draft of this post with just text. It just felt right to add something I that I really liked to do into the mix. In fact, to add some spice to the usual writing that I’m sure to be posting here in the future, I’m thinking about adding some of my drawings (that are relevant to the post’s topic of course) to as many of them as I can!

Looking for to the year ahead!