King's Oak
 | Average Customer Rating: Recommend He would make her whole againLeaving behind a disastrous marriage, Andy Calhoun moves to the small town of Pemberton, Georgia, "in search of banality." What she discovers, though, is not serenity, but Tom Dabney, a passionate and magical man.An exuberant poet who worships the wilderness surrounding Pemberton, Tom is everything Andy doesn't need in her life right now. But despite warnings from friends, Andy is soon deeply immersed in Tom's life… Product details and pricing info |
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19 Customer Reviews Posted
- Re-read it once a year
- This book is magic; I re-read it at least once a year. To me, Anne is a fore-runner for Diana Gabaldon; both push the edge in creating male characters who resort to violence and women characters who stand up and draw the line. As I re-read the first chapter alone, and copied each topic sentence into a chapbook, I noticed that Anne has plenty of sex in the first chapter; however, it is mechanical, denotative, perfunctory sex. After the first chapter, Anne turns to slow, drawn-out attraction and romantic love. I love the lyricism in every chapter. Each description of the sky rings true. Each bloody mary, martini, and party make me feel I'm sitting with the characters, sipping and observing what they see. Anne makes me wish I knew a Tom Dabney, makes me wish I could visit a cabin in the woords, and helps me step into the pages of a new magazine, Garden and Gun, which seems to extend this novel. Clever and imaginative.
For the person who noticed Andy is living at Goat Creek at the novel's end, earlier Anne has the character state that the radiation would not show up in Tom until he was an elderly man. Scratch Purvis lived, bathed, drank water much closer to the hidden source (remember also fiction and film are full of "gimmees" otherwise nothing would ever be written or filmed). After x or y amount of exposure, Andy may have just come to terms with the facts of her life. In my childhood, while some people went ahead and built a nuclear fallout shelter, my family did not; we lived with our fingers crossed and hoped for the best.
I'll add a related omission: Tom as an adult never questions how Uncle Clay manages King's Oak and never asks about how the taxes, maintenance, or upkeep get paid, another gimmee from an adult male whose income is teaching at a community college. All readers probably feel that Tom must have wondered, must have asked around, and must have asked his aunt about the arrangements. It would be difficult for Uncle Clay's financial arrangement with the bomb factory not to leak.
~J - 2008-10-25, 1 of 1 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Not worth the time spent reading
- I was so terribly disappointed in this book. It was the only book of Siddons that I hadn't read and it was just plain wierd. The story of the characters went along just fine, until Andy became inthralled with Tom, and his way of life. I do not believe that this was a healthy lifestyle for her young daughter. But what do I know of the south.
- 2008-05-17, 0 of 0 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Good story
- I thought this was a great story. I did get very upset with Andy tho', if she had stood by Tom in his campain to find the source of the bad water by telling what she too had seen a lot of grief could have been spared. But I guess the story had to play out like it did. I would have liked to have found out a little more about what happedned to Chip, hopefully he lost everything and had to start over on his own for a change.
I don't think Andy was going to teach her daughter much at Goat Creek, rather it would be the other way around. Hilary had more faith than her mother. - 2008-03-31, 0 of 0 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Good start, but tanks at the end...
- When I first started reading King's Oak by Anne Rivers Siddons, I thought it had the potential to be one of her best books. Unfortunately for Siddons (and her readers), this book tanks at the end.
King's Oak takes place in the fictional town of Pemberton, Georgia. Although considered the Newport of the South, Pemberton's real treasures are the forests, the river, the creeks, the swamps and the wildlife. Diana "Andy" Calhoun flees from Atlanta to Pemberton, the home of college friends, when her marriage crumbles. After her tumultuous marriage, she is looking for a quiet, boring life with her 11 year old daughter, Hilary. Pemberton proves to be anything but boring. A proper Southern gentleman quickly falls in love with Andy, and desires more than friendship. But Andy is continually drawn to the handsome, charismatic, and brilliant but wild, Tom Dabney.
Dabney is a college professor by trade, by his true passion is the woods where he lives, hunts, communes with nature, and engages in hunting rituals he picked up from mythology. The troubled Hilary is enchanted by Dabney, whom she calls the Dream Maker. But when it appears that someone or something is poisoning the woods, Dabney becomes "a man without limits." Andy must make a decision of heart versus head.
Siddons is overly descriptive in her writing in King's Oak, and while it's obvious that she loves the locales she writes about, it starts to become tedious for the reader. She does have some better moments from time to time. In describing her childhood, Andy muses "I no longer took people home with me, because of both my father's grotesque cartoon progress toward total drunkenness and my mother's by-then-perfected Blanche DuBois act." But while Siddons writing was strong at times, I didn't always like the characters. Andy Calhoun was whiney and weepy and I couldn't figure out Dabney's attraction to her. I also couldn't figure out why a woman looking for "boring" would be attracted to someone who ran around in the woods naked with deer blood streaked across his body, kissing the prey that he killed. But the author really loses it with the ending, which was rushed and totally unrealistic--especially in regards to nuclear clean-ups.
There is enough in King's Oak for me to give it three stars, but after a great start and almost 600 pages, I was expecting much more. - 2007-08-12, 0 of 0 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- DIFFERENT BUT WONDERFUL
- For those who have read books written by Anne Rivers Siddons, this story may seem a bit different. Well, it is. And a wonderful form of different it is! I own it in hardcover, it's the only book format I even consider, and one of my all time favorites. My home library is filled with stories by many authors with many different styles of writing and King's Oak will remain there, to be read over and over, for as long as I'm able to read.
Don't let the number of pages frighten you. A well written book can never have too many. I do not agree with the Editorial Reviews. This story is a bit far fetched, I agree, but isn't that why we read fiction instead of non-fiction? To escape our world and enter another that the author has created for us?
If you are looking for a book that's a quick read, one you can read in between coffee breaks or on the bus ride home, this one won't be for you. If you want a book packed with action, a touch of violence and some serious "sheet" action, this won't be for you either. But if you are looking for a book that is well written and shows you another world you hadn't imagined yet, then settle into that huge compfy chair of yours and begin reading King's Oak. Oh, and make sure you don't have anything that demands your attention for the rest of the day. - 2007-08-05, 1 of 1 people found this review helpful, Rated:
