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.

BURNT MOUNTAIN engages the listener with suspense, vivid and charming descriptions, and characters to care about. Kate Reading imbues each character with a distinctive accent, timbre, and pitch. Her skillful portrayals of the principal players keep the listener wondering about the story's outcome all the way to the end. This dramatic Southern saga follows a privileged Atlanta family fraught with love, lust, betrayal, and loss. Layers of dark secrets are revealed as Thayer Wentworth grows up and moves beyond her careful upbringing to marry an Irish professor, who is inexorably drawn into Burnt Mountain's web of deceit. Told in a series of flashbacks, the novel has time lines that are confusing and period references that are flawed. A.W. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine