A hundred pages into the book, I was not developing any interest in the characters. The book was still building a back story about the main character and her mother. I skipped forward to the ending and decided that I did not really want to find out what happened in the middle.

I have enjoyed several other books by Anne River Siddons, but unfortunately not this one.

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This is not your usual Anne Rivers Siddons book. It is not as bad, in my opinion, as some reviews I have read made it sound but it is certainly different for her. I enjoyed her characterizations, but the story did leave me scratching my head. Entirely forgettable. If you only read a few books a year, don't make this one of them. If like me, you have read and enjoyed all her books, try it and make up your own mind.

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Generally, I like Siddons' style. Each word, each phrase is selected with such precision. In other words, I love her complex sentence structure. This particular read was more "southern gothic" than anything else I've read that she's written. I couldn't put the book down and was sorry when I finished Burnt Mountain.

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I enjoyed this book right up until the epilogue. I'm not sure why the author spent so much time building these characters only to cut it short at the end. Even though it was obvious how things were going to turn out, I feel some details were washed over. This one left me wanting and not in a good way.

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I love a good southern Gothic novel as well as any northern Yankee, and I am very fond of Anne Rivers Siddons' books. This book is perfect up to Chapter 15. Then the Gothic gets totally out of control. The ending is great, though how they will all live without being haunted by these memories is beyond me. Just be forewarned.

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Born into an affluent family in Middletown, Georgia, the only place that tomboy Thayer Wentworth ever truly felt at home as a child was at her summer camp 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, much to her family's dismay, Thayer marries Aengus O'Neill, an Irish professor. The couple moves into her deceased grandmother's house in Atlanta, only miles from Camp Edgewood on Burnt Mountain - where Thayer's father had died in a car accident. There, in the shadow of Burnt Mountain, Aengus and Thayer lead quiet and happy lives until the day Aengus is invited up to the boys' camp - Camp Forever - to tell old Irish tales to the campers.

As Aengus begins to spend less and less time at home - and becomes increasingly distant towards her - Thayer begins to realize that something is not quite right at Camp Forever. Thayer must eventually confront several dark secrets - about her own mother, her first love, and, most devastating of all, her husband - she must come to terms with the knowledge that the man she married is not the man she thought she knew.

I must say that, while I enjoyed reading this book for the most part, there were certain parts of the story that were slightly confusing to me. I found that the story was a little slow to get into - although it was definitely intriguing once I did - and the story held my attention through until the end. I absolutely needed to know how the story ended. However, in my opinion, the plot was more convoluted than I expected - elements of the story didn't quite mesh together all that well - at least for me.

Overall, I give Burnt Mountain: A Novel by Anne Rivers Siddons a B+! It was perhaps not Ms. Siddons' best book, but still quite interesting to read.

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