Customer Reviews

The Firekeeper (Excelsior Editions)

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I have read several of Robert Moss's nonfiction books, but this is the first of his fiction that I have read. Of the probably thousands of novels I have read in a long lifetime I rank this among the very best. As an author I am humbled by his skill, his knowledge, and his heart. This novel seized me, and kept me away from things I needed to be doing, and from sleep. What an epic adventure of the spirit! I simply cannot praise it or recommend it highly enough.

In the dry, often dull, chronicles of the colony of New York, the researcher and student of history meets the names of personalities who shaped the cultural and geographic boundaries of the lands bordering and expanding beyond the Mohawk River into the thick forests of the eighteenth century western frontier. Principal among those names is that of Sir William Johnson and his intricately woven web of clients, agents, military personnel, merchants, commissaries, politicians, tenants, and tradesmen, all back-dropped against the powerful Iroquois confederacy of the Six Nations.

In THE FIREKEEPER, Robert Moss plunges beneath the carefully penned records of the Iroquois conferences, the broken promises of negotiations and land deals; searches the giving and receiving of thousands of belts and strings of wampum and chests of silver broaches, ruffled shirts and flashy red coats dreamed in historic memory to find the phrase, the innuendo, the pause, the missing sentence that allows one to grasp the beauty and power of the raw courage, stamina, and charisma of the men and women who were the real heroes of the New York frontier.

William Johnson held the British title for the negotiation of Indian affairs for the Six Nations but - raised to the powerful position as the only white chief of the Iroquois of the Six Nations [The Firekeeper] - Johnson proved the extraordinary confidence and credit in which he was held by the Iroquois in his care and use of the magnificent symbols of native power and authority--the belts, the sacred calumets, and the energy of dreams. In the dreaming culture of the Iroquois, William Johnson was caught up in a delicate balance between the magical world of spirit and soul in which he donned the antlers of the forest stag and the competitive white world where wills, personalities, and cultures clashed and fought for survival.

Woven in and among the threads of the fascinating story of THE FIREKEEPER is the powerful story of the women in William Johnson's world -- Catherine Weissenberg, the young Palatine girl who pursued her dreams across the sea from bondage to the purchased freedom of a frontier pulsing with the clash of desire and spirit; mystical fusing of the sacred and profane in a forest peopled with refugees from her own country, converging with the magical dreaming women of power of the Six Nations, of the Mohawks. Women with names like Island Woman and Sparrow bring the reader into the shadow worlds of spirit and mystical intrigue made flesh and desire in the romance and spirit of William Johnson's world. Molded from the dreaming energy of many cultures, Robert Moss' THE FIREKEEPER takes the reader on a magical journey of waking dreams, spirit and soul, allowing us to push the limitless boundaries of our own imaginal frontier.

I am not one for the study of history as I always found it very dry, but Robert Moss brought history alive in a very real and dramatic way for me. This book kept my strong interest over the course of reading it, and I found it hard to put down. The characters had much depth and their inner lives and dreams were revealed, along with a feeling of magic and destiny.
There's a great deal of adventure in this book, some realistic warring scenes that made me wince, but I believe that is how our frontier actually may developed. Life is full and not always simple or easy and this book reveals much of that.
I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a good read that will whisk them away very quickly to another time, it's entertaining in that way, but also has food for thought about the past and how we got to where we are now in this country, it's fiction that speaks of soul and life.

I loved The Firekeeper! Not only is this a blockbuster of a story, it is filled with fascinating, memorable characters that Robert Moss created out of impeccable research and his own rich imagination. All the elements one could wish for in a good read are here: a stunning evocation of time and place, the time of the French and Indian wars; a plot filled with history, mystery, and drama; characters that come alive and that I wanted to follow to the end, whether I liked them or not; and love and lust in good measure. Woven and flowing throughout the novel is the importance of dreaming to the lives of the characters, particularly but not exclusively the Mohawk. The power of dreams to foretell the future, and the shamanic way of healing, are essential underpinnings of the novel and presage Robert Moss's profound work and many nonfiction books on Dreaming and Dreamwork I highly recommend this novel!

It has been a number of years since I read this book. It sits unobtrusively on a shelf,along with many other books I own, its pages worn and bent. If you were to pass by it, you might mistake it for a casual quick read. But this worn looking, well loved book is one of my all time favorites. A gem that I lived through as I read. I would rush to get to bed at night so I could let myself be absorbed into its story of another time. I dreamed with this book at night. It filtered into both my waking and sleeping conciousness.......pretty big stuff. It is now being re released. Do I buy a fresh crisp copy? I am partial to the beloved one I have.