Burnt Mountain

May 16, 2011
Bestselling author Siddons combines American Southern and Irish folklore in her 12th novel (after Fault Lines) with lackluster results. Growing up around Georgia's wealthy elite, 17-year-old free spirit Thayer Wentworth finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. But a test shows that her baby is "badly... malformed" and she has an abortion. She makes a fresh start at college, where she falls for Dr. Aengus O'Neill, a gregarious but oddly childlike professor. When Thayer's favorite grandmother dies, she inherits her fairy taleâlike Atlanta home and moves into it with O'Neill, now her husband. O'Neill, a famous storyteller (he's invited to speak at a nearby boy's camp) becomes so obsessed with disturbing scenes he remembers from his native Ireland that Thayer begins to think he's mad. Coincidentally enough, she's confronted with her past at the most opportune moment, showing her a clear way out. With anemic characters and many unresolved story lines, Siddons takes on too much and does too little with it.

August 29, 2011
Thayer Wentworth and her husband, Irish professor Aengus, live a contented existence in Atlanta, just a few miles from Burnt Mountain’s Camp Edgewood—where Thayer spent her summers and first found love. But when Aengus is invited to tell Irish folk tales to campers at Edgewood, he becomes increasingly distant, and Thayer is forced to confront not only her past but also her family and her husband’s dark secrets. Kate Reading’s narration is steady and precise; she offers up a dramatic performance and infuses her narration with a hint of a Southern accent, its influence lingering politely behind her vowels. But it is in the book’s dialogue that Reading shines brightest, producing an assortment of twangs, drawls, burrs, and even a brogue. A Grand Central hardcover.

February 1, 2011

As a child, Thayer Wentworth adored Camp Greyledge on Georgia's Burnt Mountain, even if she did find first love and then first heartbreak there. So at first she's happy when she moves nearby with her new husband, Irish-born professor Aengus, and he's invited to the camp as storyteller. But then, as it often does, the past rears its ugly head. With a reading group guide and fun for many readers.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2011

Summer camps play a pivotal role in the life of a young Atlanta heiress.

Thayer Wentworth has always been a disappointment to her mother, Crystal. Tomboyish, and too much like Crystal's distrusted mother-in-law, Caroline, known as "Grand," Thayer yearns for the life of the mind. In this Thayer resembles her father Finch, an educator, who died in an accident en route from a camp on Burnt Mountain. Grand, who refused to grant Crystal (a shopkeeper's daughter) entree to Atlanta's aristocratic Buckhead set, clearly favors Thayer over her more frivolous older sister Lily. When Grand moves into Crystal's house after Finch dies, she grooms Thayer to inherit her father's rarified legacy. First, there's a counselorship at Sherwood Forest, an exclusive girls' camp, where Thayer meets Nick Abrams, counselor at a nearby boys' camp. The two fall madly in love and vow to marry, however when Nick departs for Europe, Thayer learns she is pregnant. Nick never writes or phones as he promised, and Thayer is tricked by Crystal into having an abortion. After a difficult physical and emotional recovery, Thayer attends Sewanee University at Grand's urging, and there she meets and weds Celtic mythology professor Aengus. Crystal and Grand are no more thrilled about the Irish Aengus than they were about the Jewish Nick, however Grand is at least supportive. After a shocking betrayal (Crystal tells Aengus that the abortion left Thayer sterile), a permanent mother-daughter rift results. Grand dies, leaving Thayer and Aengus a rustic fieldstone house in a wooded Atlanta suburb. At first life is blissful, but then a local corrupt politician flatters Aengus into propagating Celtic lore at a boys' camp (which churns out the Atlanta equivalent of Stepford Teens) that's located, ominously enough, on Burnt Mountain. Suddenly Aengus' seemingly benign Celtic obsession turns into something menacing and Michael Flatley–like.

Siddons is at her usual incisive best at skewering the mores of socially pretentious Southerners, and her prose is limpid and mesmerizing, but the grand gignol denouement beggars belief.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 1, 2011
Siddons atmospheric new novel is set in the Deep South, where spirited Thayer Wentworth has grown up in the shadow of her elegant mothers disappointment. Crystal had hoped that marrying wealthy Finch Wentworth would mean she could leave the small town of Lytton behind for Atlantas high society, but Finchs job at a boys school his family owns keeps him tethered. Thayer is crushed when her father is killed in a car accident when shes just nine years old, and her clashes with her mother intensify. A first love at camp brings Thayer joy, but separation and a tragedy cut short the idyllic romance. Thayer goes on to fall in love with and wed an enigmatic Irish mythology professor she meets in her last semester at school, but this romance is troubled, too, when his fixation on folklore threatens to consume him. Siddons mixes in a touch of the supernatural to bring the novel to an exciting climax, but whats most appealing here is the layered family drama and the lush world Thayer inhabits. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A master storyteller with a remarkable track record, bestselling Siddons returns to her signature Southern setting in her newest blend of emotional realism and a sliver of magic.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)