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Summary
Summary
Destined for bestseller lists, here is a multigenerational tale of three families and their entangled loves, dreams, and tragedies, set in a summer colony perched above the cold, rolling waters of the Maine coast. As 90-year-old Maude waits at the colony for her granddaughter to come and take her home, she looks back on her full life.
Author Notes
Novelist Anne Rivers Siddons was born in Fairburn, Georgia in 1936. She studied at Auburn University in Alabama and Oglethorpe University in Atlanta.
Siddons was an editor and columnist for the Auburn Plainsman, senior editor for Atlanta magazine and worked in advertising.
Her treatment of the South in her novels often earns comparisons to Margaret Mitchell. One of her books, Peachtree Road, won her Georgia author of the year honors (1988). Her novels include: Sweetwater Creek, Off Season and Burnt Mountain. In 2014 her title, The Girls of August, made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
If it's gothic, Siddons (Outer Banks, King's Oak, etc.) can do it, or so it would appear in this latest novel destined for commercial success. In it, she takes her gifts for melodrama and tangling family trees up north, to a summer colony for Boston Brahmins on the coast of Maine, called simply ``Retreat.'' But Siddons's heroine is a southerner, and on her she demonstrates one of her best tricks--her deep intimacy with her leading ladies, which the author shares with her readers from the get-go. Anyway, it isn't easy for sweet young Maude Gascoigne, from a moldering plantation near Charleston, to fit in when her new husband, sterling-silver Peter Chambliss (of a Boston banking family, Princeton, and Retreat), takes her to the summer place. For the first few decades Maude battles it out with her insufferable, hypercritical mother-in-law, the drunken and lecherous husband of her best friend, Amy Potter, and even Peter himself--a depressive, hermetic man who just sails away whenever things get rough. Gradually, though, little Maudie gets some starch and learns to endure almost anything, including: the death of her mother-in-law (``my beloved enemy''); Peter's weird coldness to his own two children, which ultimately sends the younger, Happy, to a sanitarium; the death of a grandson; the return of a bad seed, Elizabeth, Amy Potter's girl, who does her best to break up Maude's son's marriage; and whispers that float on the salt spray every summer about how much Elizabeth looks like Peter. Well, it turns out that Elizabeth's connection to Peter is very much an issue--but we're not telling why. Long-suffering Maude may not be everyone's cup of tea, but this time Siddons gets the melodrama balance just right and shows she's as much at home in Maine as she was in Georgia. Fans will be doing cartwheels, and others will queue up.
Booklist Review
Once again Siddons (Outer Banks) casts a southern girl out of her element, this time in a high-society summer colony in Maine. Muskrattish Maude Gascoigne, raised in the swamps, discovers the outer world on the fateful night her older brother brings home a Princeton buddy, Bostonian Peter Chambliss, to escort her to the traditional St. Cecilia's coming-out ball in Charleston. Instant and deep, her love for Peter catapults her into the highly structured world of the summering place called "Retreat." This saga of three generations of Chamblisses culminates in Maude's desperate struggle to protect and pass the legacy on to her granddaughter before the place is destroyed. Although her verbal artistry cannot be denied, Siddons never quite captures the feel of a place or a person--one is left with the impression of a very pretty painting that looks much like other very pretty paintings. Couched in remembrance, the author's constant flipping between time periods can be exasperating. But once the narrative starts rolling one can settle in for a steady story with nice feeling for female character. A commendable portrait of older society types sharing experience with those who don't yet have it. Book-of-the-Month main selection; Reader's Digest Condensed Book selection. (Reviewed May 15, 1992)0060179333Denise Blank
Excerpts
Excerpts
Colony Chapter One All places where the French settled early have corruption at their heart, a kind of soft, rotten glow, like the phosphorescence of decaying wood, that is oddly attractive. Seductive, even, if my mother-in-law, whose astonishing opinion that was, was to be believed. And she was always believed. The conventional wisdom of her day was that Hannah Stuart Chambliss would rather be burnt at the stake than tell a lie. I don't find that surprising at all. I think the Maid of Orleans role would have pleased Mother Hannah to a fare-thee-well, even the fiery martyr's death. Mother H had a streak of thespian in her as wide as her savage stratum of truth, and she employed it just as fiercely when the need arose. I never knew anyone who escaped those twin lashes except my husband, Peter. He alone might have profited from them. She told me that, about the corruption and the seduction, on the evening I came to Retreat colony for the first time. It must have been in her mind ever since she first met me, the year before, when Peter took me to the big house in Boston to meet her and his father, but she had never voiced it until then. But it was plain to me--and, I suppose, to Peter--that it, or something like it, lay like an iceberg beneath her austere and beautiful surface. Oh, she smiled her carved Etruscan smile, all the years of our relationship, and hugged me lightly and kissed my cheek with lips like arctic butterflies, but none of us were fooled. I don't think she meant us to be. My unsuitability hung in the pristine air of the Chambliss drawing room like a body odor. But it was not until Peter brought me as a bride to the old brown cottage on Penobscot Bay, in northern Maine, where the Chamblisses had summered for generations, that she allowed that particular little clot of displeasure to pass, and with it damned me and Charleston, and, indeed the entire indolent, depraved South to Retreat's own efficient purgatory. That she said it with a little hug of my shoulders and a small laugh, in response to something old Mrs. Stallings bellowed in her ginny bray, did nothing to mitigate its sting. Augusta Stallings looked at me, small and roundly curved and black-eyed and -haired and brown with sun, standing in the chilly camphor dusk of the cottage's living room, and fell upon my utter alienness, in that place of fair straight hair and rain-colored eyes and long bones and teeth and oval New England faces, like a trout on a mayfly. "Charleston, you say?" she shouted. "Gascoigne, from Charleston? I know some Pinckneys and a Huger, but I never met any Gascoignes. French, is it? Or Creole, I expect. Well, you're a colorful little thing, no doubt about that. You'll open some eyes at the dining hall, my girl." And that is when my mother-in-law laid her long Stuart arm around my shoulders and made her light little speech about the French and corruption and seduction. My face flamed darker, but I doubt that anyone noticed. The cottage's living room was as dark as a cave because Hannah would rarely allow the huge lilac trees that obscured its windows to be cut. It was the first thing I did after she died. Peter pulled me close, grinning first at his mother and then at Augusta Stallings. "The only French who settled in Charleston were four hundred good gray Huguenots on the run after Louis the Fourteenth revoked the Edict of Nantes," he said. "Not a jot or tittle of corruption in the lot of them. Or seductiveness either, I imagine. Unless, of course, you meant that Maude was an octoroon, Mama?" "Don't be silly, Peter," Hannah said, in a tone that said she had indeed entertained the possibility. There was my dark skin, after all, and the black eyes, and the hair that curled in tight ringlets around my head. And something about the nose.... "You mean a nigger?" Augusta Stallings brayed, peering more closely at me in the cold, pearly dusk. The tumbler of neat gin that she held sloshed onto the sisal rug. Colony . Copyright © by Anne Rivers Siddons. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Colony by Anne Rivers Siddons All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
