Reviewed by Janet Jensen for Readers' Favorite

Natalie Goldberg makes this comment about southern writers: “Often when a southerner reads, the members of the class look at each other, and you can hear them thinking, gee, I can't write like that. The power and force of the land is heard in the piece. These southerners know the names of what shrubs hang over what creek, what dogwood flowers bloom what color, what kind of soil is under their feet."

“I tease the class, ‘Pay no mind. It's the southern writing gene. The rest of us have to toil away.’” And on the subject of southern women, Blanche McCrary Boyd says: “My sister says Southerners are like other people, only more so."

Anne River Siddons’ "Burnt Mountain" paints detailed portraits of three generations of one family of southern women: Grand (grandmother), Crystal, her daughter-in-law, and Crystal’s daughters Lily and Thayer. Crystal and Lily are more like sisters; Thayer resembles her father and Grand in her face and in her soul. They are all, as Boyd says, strong personalities who are like other people, only more so.

After her father’s untimely death due to an auto accident, Thayer lives in numbed misery, feeling unloved by anyone other than Grand, until she finds peace, exuberance and freedom at summer camp in the North Carolina mountains. However, her last summer there, when she is seventeen, ends in tragedy, betrayal and heartbreak. In a daze, Thayer goes on to attend a liberal arts college high in the mountains of Tennessee, only returning to her true nature when she meets Angus, an unconventional and passionate Irish professor, whose personality seems bigger than life.

Crystal’s lifelong ambition is to live among the “right people” in Atlanta, which she sees as her only possible destiny. When circumstances disappoint her, she grooms Lily, her favorite, for the perfect high society life of a southern woman. Instead, Lily elopes with a football player named Goose.

It is Thayer who inherits with Grand’s stately home just outside of Atlanta, where every day in the summer she and Angus hear the children singing on the bus that is headed for the nearby summer camp on Burnt Mountain. This brings unsettling and haunting memories of summer camp and her father’s death on the mountain to Thayer. At the same time "Burnt Mountain" pulls Angus deeper and deeper into its dark forests and their promise of ancient magic.

As always, Siddons’ prose is lush and richly descriptive. Her characters are flawed, colorful and believable. She infuses the book with vivid sensory images of the south and its traditions.

This audio version is well done. The story itself works well until the last section of the book, when I felt there was a jarring disconnect leading to the rather bizarre and confusing ending, which didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the carefully constructed plot. It feels as if several chapters of critical plot development are missing for the reader who is deeply involved in the story.

Still, the book is well worth reading, and perhaps the reader’s imagination can guide their interpretation of the storyline on a more logical path to the conclusion.

I am a great admirer of Siddons' work ("Peachtree Road", etc.) and I look forward to reading more of her books. With the rich combination of southern locales and characters and her gift for storytelling, any book by Siddons promises to be a great read.