Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Grew Up… a proper lady. Born into a wealthy family, Ada never had to take care of herself in any way, let alone engage in outdoor work. No, the real work was left to her servants, while Ada practiced brewing tea.
Living… on Black Cove, the farm she just inherited from her minister father. Sadly, Ada doesn’t know the first thing about farming, let alone surviving a cold winter in Cold Mountain, a rural area that’s the polar opposite of her city-girl upbringing. She relies on the kindness of strangers, including Ruby Thewes, a no-nonsense young woman sent to help her keep the farm alive. With the Civil War raging and all the able-bodied men are gone, it’s up to the two women to survive.
Profession… farmer. Ada starts accepting her new role as the out-doorsy type. Especially because it doesn’t seem like the men will be returning to Cold Mountain any time soon.
Interests… dresses, fine china, and pretty baubles. Now, however, Ada's only interests are keeping warm and keeping her stomach full.
Relationship Status… in a long distance relationship with Inman, a soldier who had only started courting her before he marches off to war. Despite their short romance, however, Ada is devoted to Inman and lives only to see him again. She constantly writes letters to him, telling him, “If you are fighting, stop fighting. If you are marching, stop marching. Come back to me. Come back to me is my request.”
Challenge… surviving in Cold Mountain until Inman returns to her. As she tells him, “I will not leave Cold Mountain. My last thread of courage is to wait… for you.” In the meantime, she must bring this farm into working order and feed herself from its bounty.
Personality… classy and refined. After a harsh season in Cold Mountain, she may just harden up and turn into the kind of independent woman that Ruby is.
Get to Know her in...
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In this classic story of love and devotion set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, a wounded Confederate soldier named W.P. Inman deserts his unit and travels across the South, aiming to return to his young wife, Ada, who he left behind to tend their farm. As Inman makes his perilous journey home, Ada struggles to keep their home intact with the assistance of Ruby, a mysterious drifter sent to help her by a kindly neighbor.
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NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished American in all its savagery, solitude, and splendor.
Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, Inman, a Confederate soldier, decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains and to Ada, the woman he loved there years before. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, Ada is trying to revive her father's derelict farm and learn to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away. As it interweaves their stories, Cold Mountain asserts itself as an authentic American Odyssey--hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
