Siddons, Anne Rivers Books

Off Season

Anne Rivers Siddons

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 66 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

From J. Kaye's Book Blog 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The story begins shortly after the funeral services of Lilly Constable McCall's husband, Cam. Against her daughters' protests, she decides to head to coastal Maine where her family's cottage and its memories await her. Lily takes us back to her childhood of innocence and the losses she experienced and then her life with Cam.

Before I go further, let me make something perfectly clear. I feel Anne Rivers Siddons is a phenomenal writer. In OFF SEASON, she digs deep, exposing the human side in all of us. Do you hear a "but" coming? There really isn't one, but Siddons goes too deep that it's painful for me to experience. The last time I was moved to such a state was over Terms of Endearment. The writer packed such an emotion punch that leaves me so sad and full of pain days after reading the last page. It's a wonderful literary read, but sensitive types might feel Lily's pain all the way to their bones.

Now that I have made that perfectly clear, the ending was a total let down. I can understand no happily ever after, but this left me bitter. This is just a suggestion. If this isn't an author you tried before, try another book first. This was my first and it's totally ruined me for reading another.

These are the things I look for in a good story. I had a heck of a time getting into the book. I picked it up several times and what I read was good, but it wasn't enough to hold my interest. So for me, it had some dry spots.

The second problem was at the end. I just thought that was wrong. Maybe I became too wrapped up in Lily. But I asked the question what was the purpose for Cam's betrayal and couldn't come up with a logical answer. That was cruel, totally cruel. The book doesn't get a check in the good ending department.

Editorial Review:

Acclaimed novelist Anne Rivers Siddons's new novel is a stunning tale of love and loss.


For as long as she can remember, they were Cam and Lilly--happily married, totally in love with each other, parents of a beautiful family, and partners in life. Then, after decades of marriage, it ended as every great love story does...in loss. After Cam's death, Lilly takes a lone road trip to her and Cam's favorite spot on the remote coast of Maine, the place where they fell in love over and over again, where their ghosts still dance. There, she looks hard to her past--to a first love that ended in tragedy; to falling in love with Cam; to a marriage filled with exuberance, sheer life, and safety-- to try to figure out her future.

It is a journey begun with tender memories and culminating in a revelation that will make Lilly re-evaluate everything she thought was true about her husband and her marriage.

Peachtree Road

Anne Rivers Siddons

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 37 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

fascinating but flawed 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

The glimpse into a life that few of us understand was enthralling, but after awhile I couldn't care less about the characters. I finished it because I was hoping they would somehow redeem themselves. In Siddon's other stories her characters are deeply flawed but somehow we see why they are, and what they can't overcome. Here these folks have it all and still can't be decent human beings. I really had no sympathy for the moral lethargy of all of them.

Editorial Review:

Headstrong, independent, and devastatingly beautiful Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable will never become the demure Southern lady her family requires—while her older cousin, Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant III, is too shy and bookish, a far cry from the suave, gregarious Southern gentleman he's expected to be. In the Bondurants' sprawling home on Atlanta's Peachtree Road, these two will be united by a fierce tainted love—and torn apart by a smoldering rage fanned by the cruelty of years and the unbending demands of privilege.

A masterful tale of love, hate, and rebellion set in an elite world of class and wealth, New York Times bestselling author Anne Rivers Siddons's Peachtree Road is the unforgettable story of the turbulent growth of a great Southern city and of two people cursed by blood and birth.

Colony

Anne Rivers Siddons

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 53 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

An unforgettable story of love, acceptance, and tradition.

When Maude Chambliss first arrives at Retreat, the seasonal home of her husband's aristocratic family, she is a nineteen-year-old bride fresh from South Carolina's Low Country. Among the patrician men and women who reside in the summer colony on the coast of Maine, her gypsy-like beauty and impulsive behavior immediately brand her an outsider. She, as well as everyone else, is certain she will never fit in. And of course, she doesn't...at first.

But over the many summers she spends there, Maude comes to cherish life in the colony, as she does the people who share it with her. There is her husband Peter, consumed with a darkness of spirit; her adored but dangerously fragile children; her domineering mother-in-law, who teaches her that it is the women who posses the strength to keep the colony intact; and Maine native Micah Willis, who is ultimately Maude's truest friend.

This brilliant novel, rich with emotion, is filled with appealing, intense, and indomitable characters. Anne Rivers Siddons paints a portrait of a woman determined to preserve the spirit of past generations--and the future of aplaice where she became who she is...a place called Colony.

"An outstanding multigenerational novel...We are hooked from the moment we meet Maude."
The New York Times

The House Next Door

Anne Rivers Siddons

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 76 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Anne Rivers Siddons is a writer of literary fiction whose one foray into the horror genre is this remarkable 1978 novel, The House Next Door. The setting is a wealthy suburb in Atlanta where an ambitious young architect is building a dramatically contemporary house. The novel uses a frame device to put three short stories under a single cover: as each of three families moves into the house in succession, we watch the bad things that happen to them and eventually force them to leave. But the frame itself--the observations of an urbane and sophisticated couple who live next door and become close friends with the architect--is the most deeply involving story in the book.

Stephen King was so impressed by The House Next Door that when he wrote Danse Macabre, his personal tour of the horror genre, he sought out Siddons for an interview. She told him, "The haunted house has always spoken specially and directly to me as the emblem of particular horror. Maybe it's because, to a woman, her house is so much more than that: it is kingdom, responsibility, comfort, total world to her.... It is an extension of ourselves; it tolls in answer to one of the most basic chords mankind will ever hear.... So basic is it that the desecration of it, the corruption, as it were, by something alien takes on a peculiar and bone-deep horror and disgust."

Siddons was also fascinated by how the supernatural has the power to disturb the complacent rich and their comfortable little world: "What has the unspeakable and the unbelievable got to do with second homes and tax shelters and private schools for the kids and a pâté in every terrine and a BMW in every garage? Primitive man might howl before his returning dead and point; his neighbor would see, and howl along with him.... The resident of Fox Run Chase who meets a ghoulie out by the hot tub is going to be frozen dead in his or her Nikes on the tennis courts the next day if he or she persists in gabbling about it. And there he is, alone with the horror and ostracized on all sides. It's a double turn of the screw."

One caveat: some people find the ending a false note that mars the effect. Even so, The House Next Door is an exquisite horror novel. --Fiona Webster

Fox's Earth

Anne Rivers Siddons

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

One of Siddons Best 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I truly LOVED this book. Once I started reading, I couldn't stop. I found myself sympathtic for Ruth Fox at the begining of the story however by the end my feelings completely changed. I do feel some of the sterotypes are not realistic of "us true southeners" however it all just adds to the true mystery and grace of the south. I still wonder if Ruth Yancy Fox just happened to, well I will leave the suspense of the ending of this book to you to read and wonder about yourself. I do have my own conclusions. Happy Reading.

Editorial Review:

When it comes to depicting the modern American South, Anne River Siddons is unrivaled. In Fox's Earth, called "psychologically astute and excellently written" by Cosmopolitan, she pens a dark but seductive tale of five generations of Southern women and the house that was at once both their greatest inheritance and their most confining prison.

In 1904, Ruth Yancey is only ten years old when she is brought to live at the magnificent mansion called Fox's Earth. But the impoverished daughter of an abusive mill worker has already internalized her mother's steely code: Men may hold all the power, but a woman possesses one thing that can get her anything in the world she wants...if she's prepared to make certain sacrifices. Deserted by her mother in order to give her a better chance at wealth, Ruth's own ambition drives her to possess Fox's Earth at any cost, even though her sacrifice will ultimately be her own husband, children, and grandchildren.

Homeplace

Anne Rivers Siddons

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Deeply Moving Story of Forgiveness 4 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

Micah "Mike" Winship was going home to a place she'd fled in 1963 when her father had thrown her out. It's twenty years later, she's become an award-winning journalist, and has not spoken to her father in all that time. A plea from her sister, Dee Dee asking her to return and help with their father who was dying from prostate cancer and wanted to see her came at a point in Mike's life where she virtually had no other place to go. Mike's world was collapsing around her and she needed a place to go - to re-group, and pull herself together, even if it meant facing the man whose love and acceptance she had tried to gain during her awful childhood. What Mike finally discovers, after more betrayals, is the heart, soul and essence of the man she called `daddy' and a real place called `home'.

This was my first book by this author whose eloquence with the written word is so outstanding that she slips under the skin of the extremely well sketched characters and lets you breathe their air, and pump their blood. You will laugh, cry, and feel each emotion as the author sketches the life of a memorable journey taken by the youngest daughter of coming home again. Totally thought provoking and believable. This is an outstanding classic novel that I see why it has been resurrected and reissued for a new generation of readers to embrace!

Editorial Review:

After twenty-one years Micah (Mike) Winship is making the big move--she's going home for a visit. She hasn't been back since 1963, when her father threw her out, but now he is dying and asking for her. And although she is armed with her succesful journalism career and the strength found after her divorce, she is nearing forty and her sophisticated urban lifestyle is falling apart.

Heading home, Mike is unprepared for a past that has lain in wait for her--one that includes an old love, a spoiled sister, and a plot to seize her family's land. And in trying to understand her long-forgotten self, she learns at last those lessons best learned early about love and loss, family and forgiveness, and the undeniable need for a place called home.

Up Island

Anne Rivers Siddons

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 60 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Up Island chronicles the mass redemption of a unlikely group, thrown together by the vicissitudes of love and fate: "a six foot Southern Betrayed Wife and her widowed father and a senile old Portuguese lesbian and a one-legged schoolteacher and a mongrel dog and two aberrant swans..." As the novel begins, newly divorced Molly Redwine is in the market for some redemption. Battered and numb from loss, she comes to Martha's Vineyard to escape and heal if she can. For the next 300 pages, the story shuttles between Molly's heart, packed with pain, regret, and guilt, and the sea-licked open spaces of the island. By book's end, both places are terra cognita. There are family secrets, haunted dreams, and enough death to do Shakespeare proud--balanced delicately with small pleasures, kindness, and unbreakable bonds. Up Island is a fractal of a book: complicated but ultimately satisfying as only the completion of a pattern can be. Intelligent and insightful, it is good story tenderly told.

King's Oak

Anne Rivers Siddons

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Re-read it once a year 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This book is magic; I re-read it at least once a year. To me, Anne is a fore-runner for Diana Gabaldon; both push the edge in creating male characters who resort to violence and women characters who stand up and draw the line. I love the lyricism in every chapter. Each description of the sky rings true. Each bloody mary and party make me feel I'm sitting with the characters, sipping and observing what they see. Anne makes me wish I knew a Tom Dabney, makes me wish I could visit a cabin in the woords, and helps me step into the pages of a new magazine, Gun and Garden, which seems to extend this novel. Clever and imaginative. ~J

Editorial Review:

He would make her whole again

Leaving behind a disastrous marriage, Andy Calhoun moves to the small town of Pemberton, Georgia, "in search of banality." What she discovers, though, is not serenity, but Tom Dabney, a passionate and magical man.

An exuberant poet who worships the wilderness surrounding Pemberton, Tom is everything Andy doesn't need in her life right now. But despite warnings from friends, Andy is soon deeply immersed in Tom's life and his world . . . a world he will do anything to protect. When Tom declares war on the enemy poisoning his woods, it becomes clear that Andy must choose between her life with Tom and the one she left behind . . . if Pemberton society will take her back.

Outer Banks

Anne Rivers Siddons

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 37 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Not for me 2 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I usually enjoy Anne River Siddons, but this book just left me unsatisfied. I thought the twist at the ending was just silly (with Paul and Fig). I have to say this is my least favorite of Siddons' books so far.

Editorial Review:

Elegant Kate, walking a tightrope over an abyss of lies...sensitive, sensible, self-contained Cecie...Ginger, the heiress, sexy, vibrant, richer than sin...and poor, hopeless, brilliant Fig—they came together as sorority sisters on a Southern campus in the '60s. Four young women bound by rare, blinding, early friendship—they spend two idyllic spring breaks at Nag's Head, North Carolina, the isolated strip of barrier islands where grand old weatherbeaten houses perch defiantly on the edge of a storm-tossed sea. Now thirty years later, they are coming back. They are coming back to recapture the exquisite magic of those early years...to experience again the love, the enthusiasm, the passion, pain, and cruel-betrayal that shaped the four young girls into women and set them all adrift on the...Outer Banks.

Heartbreak Hotel

Anne Rivers Siddons

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Anne Rivers Siddons "cannot be surpassed in evoking a kind of life peculiar to the South," says Publishers Weekly. Her classic novel Heartbreak Hotel, praised as "anything but nostalgic" by The New York Times, excels with an insightful, troubling tale of the coming of age of a privileged young Southern woman during the turbulent Civil Rights era.

In Montgomery, Alabama, Martin Luther King has organized a bus boycott. In Tuscaloosa, outrage surrounds the entrance of the state university's first black student. But at little Randolph University, sweltering in the summer heat, life remains dreamily the same. At Kappa House, the sorority sisters talk of who has pinned whom, and whether they can sneak past their housemother so they can party at an out-of-town bar. Even among this privileged group, pretty, popular Kappa sister Maggie Deloach is unquestionably one of the elite...until she commits a single act of defiance and courage that forever alters the way others think of her, and how Maggie thinks of herself.