Burnt Mountain: Book summary and reviews of Burnt Mountain by Anne Rivers Siddons

Burnt Mountain Summary

Growing up, the only place tomboy Thayer Wentworth felt at home was at her summer camp - Camp Sherwood Forest in the North Carolina Mountains. It was there that she came alive and where she met Nick Abrams, her first love... and first heartbreak.

Years later, Thayer marries Aengus, an Irish professor, and they move into her deceased grandmother's house in Atlanta, only miles from Camp Edgewood on Burnt Mountain where her father died years ago in a car accident. There, Aengus and Thayer lead quiet and happy lives until Aengus is invited up to the camp to tell old Irish tales to the campers. As Aengus spends less time at home and becomes more distant, Thayer must confront dark secrets - about her mother, her first love, and, most devastating of all, her husband.

Burnt Mountain Reviews

"[F]un for many readers." - Library Journal

"With anemic characters and many unresolved story lines, Siddons takes on too much and does too little with it." - Publishers Weekly

"Siddons mixes in a touch of the supernatural to bring the novel to an exciting climax, but what's most appealing here is the layered family drama and the lush world Thayer inhabits. " - Booklist

"Siddons is at her usual incisive best at skewering the mores of socially pretentious Southerners, and her prose is limpid and mesmerizing." - Kirkus Reviews

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Burnt Mountain Reader Reviews

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Rated of 5 by ARLENE BUTLER
BURNT MOUNTAIN
I enjoyed the book very much. It is a good family and coming-of-age story. I regret that her grandmother hid so much from her. She knew and could have told her. Her mother was the problem and her grandmother did not disclose that. They would not have hurt her as much at an earlier age as they did later. This book is beter than the last two Siddons books. I hope there is a follow up on it. Could resurrect her first love now that some of the southern predjudices are not as strong.

Anne Rivers Siddons Author Biography

Anne River Siddons was born in 1936 in Fairburn, Georgia, a small railroad town just south of Atlanta, where her family has lived for six generations. The only child of a prestigious Atlanta lawyer and his wife, Siddons was raised to be a perfect Southern belle. Growing up, she did what was expected of her: getting straight A's, becoming head cheerleader, the homecoming queen, and then Centennial Queen of Fairburn. At Auburn University she studied illustration, joined the Tri-Delt sorority, and "did the things I thought I should. I dated the right guys. I did the right activities," and wound up voted "Loveliest of the Plains."

During her student years at Auburn, the Civil Rights Movement first gained national attention, with the bus boycott in Montgomery and the...

... Full Biography

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