It's best to begin by being brutally honest with your students: The Last of the Mohicans is an adventure story that focuses on adventurous adventures of the old-school type. The protagonists are far from Marvel superheroes—they're a bunch of English settlers and Native Americans who get caught up in the struggle and messiness of the French and Indian War. It's a story about old-school values: the American frontier, loyalty, love, and self-sacrifice. Many lovely sentiments abound in this story. Not least of all, there's an awesome man of the woods named Hawkeye who serves as the quintessential American male—and no lie, he's awesomely awesome.

There are several challenges when tackling a book like this. Many people aren't hip on James Fenimore Cooper's descriptive writing. Let's just say that there's not a piece of tree bark that goes undescribed. Cooper is known to write over three continuous pages of pure description. Maybe he just really wants everyone to feel like a part of the story. Unfortunately, these uber-descriptive descriptions can be boring for students; especially our modern-day students who are used to digesting fast-paced, easy to read novels like The Hunger Games (not that we don't love you, Katniss).