I just finished this book over the weekend. This is the first one on my Fall Into Reading Challenge list.
This was a good read but not one of my favorites from this author.
The setting was the deep south: Georgia and the North Carolina Mountains.
The genre is fiction....it's a "spellbinding tale of love and betrayal within a wealthy Southern family." (book jacket)
Story Summary: Thayer Wentworth grew up as a tomboy. She felt most at home in the summer camp located in the North Carolina Mountains. She was able to get away from her mother's high expectations and the loss/grief of her father's tragic death. She met her first love at the camp---Nick Abrams...and experienced her first heartbreak.
Several years later, during college, she meets an Irish professor, Aengus. They marry and move into her grandmother's house in Atlanta, just a few miles from Camp Edgewood, located on Burnt Mountain, where her father died in the car accident. Her grandmother is now dead and is known throughout the book as "Grand". She is the only one who truly understood Thayer, and loved her with all her heart. Thayer also has an older sister (Lily) who is everything Thayer is not.
Aengus and Thayer lead quiet lives and are very happy...they are content with their easy routines and the neighborhood which is friendly. One day Aengus is invited up to the camp on Burnt Mountain to tell stories of the old Irish myths. Things slowly begin to change. He spends less time at home and more time up on the mountain. Thayer is forced to confront some dark secrets. About her mother, her first love, and the most devastating of all....her husband.
My Thoughts: it's a quick read. Easy writing and typical characters of the author. It tends to go back in the past early on so you get a sense of where Thayer is coming from but I quickly became bored with the setting in the past. I think the author could have explained her past in a shorter time frame. It tended to be a little confusing in the parts where Thayer was a little girl.
It is a bit of an "odd" book because some of it reads like a fantasy or science fiction....it is a bit mystical and strange. And in this, it is also oddly disturbing...especially towards the end of the book. It does show us how they ways we love can shape our lives....and the things we keep from those we know best...how damaging betrayals can be.
On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the best, I rate this novel a 6.
It is appropriate for ages 16 and older.
2 comments:
Wow, that was fast. One down already. I've never heard of this author.
Susanne you'd like her books...she wrote several that are very good, all of them (if i remember correctly) are set in the south...i think one might have been set in Maine. I've read most of hers....
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