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Title details for Islands by Anne Rivers Siddons - Available

Islands

by Anne Rivers Siddons
Anna Fields
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available

Anny Butler never had a real family until she married Lewis Aiken. Having spent her life caring for others, first for her own brothers and sisters, then as a director of an agency devoted to the welfare of children, she finds that the love she shares with Lewis is everything she ever dreamed of. The family she meets through Lewis is not brethren in the traditional sense but rather a group of friends who have been inseparable since childhood. From first meeting them at the beach house they co-own, Anny finds a sense of security and love that fulfills a lifetime of yearning. As they grow closer, however, revealing confidences and forging emotional bonds, Anny begins to suspect everything is not as it seems and that the new loves she waited a lifetime for may hide a secret with a terrible price.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 2, 2006

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780792744009
      • File size: 346983 KB
      • Duration: 12:02:52

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      ISLANDS is a Southern saga about lifelong friends who call themselves the Scrubs. The core members grew up together in Charleston; with their spouses they share a shambling Carolina beach house where they spend vacations and holidays together and share high points and low. Anne Siddons is like a juggler keeping eight wheeling torches effortlessly in air while telling a story and whistling Dixie. This seems to be a tale of lucky, loving friends and the changes time brings, until things take a Gothic turn. Not the kind of reader who would let you mistake a Kentucky accent for a Carolina one, Kate Fleming is warm, engaged, and thoroughly convincing, and does this entertainment to a buttery turn. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 5, 2004
      A starred or boxed review indicates a book of outstanding quality. A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of unusual commercial interest that hasn't received a starred or boxed review
      .
      ISLANDS
      Anne Rivers Siddons
      . HarperCollins
      , $24.95 (384p) ISBN 0-06-621111-5

      Middle-aged readers especially will warm to Siddons's 15th novel, in which a group of old friends play together, age together and endure the vicissitudes of fate. Returning to the Carolina low country where she is most at home, Siddons explores the mystique of an elite social strata whose members are held together by bloodlines, loyalty and tradition, and by the love of their city, Charleston, and the offshore islands—Edisto and Sullivan's—where they spend their leisure time. Newcomer Anny Butler, the director of a Charleston philanthropic social services agency, is accepted into the close-knit group, who call themselves the Scrubs, when she marries surgeon Lewis Aiken. Thereafter, the novel records the idyllic lives of beautiful people who have wealth, intelligence, breeding and a passion for hunting dogs. Siddons dwells lovingly on details of landscape and atmosphere, flora and fauna, home decoration, and food specialties and the bistros where they are served. Everything is picturesque to the nth degree, somewhat like a Thomas Kincaid painting. Relentlessly chirpy dialogue moves the plot along, while various illnesses and accidents take their toll on once happy couples. Lush overwriting sets the tone: one character "shone like a beacon in the great gilded room, and people flocked around her as if to a fire"; later, she is perceived as "thrumming with a kind of palpable radiance... you could almost see the dancing particles of light around her." When Siddons shows that nothing is what it seems, the revelation is almost inevitable. Yet she cannot be surpassed in evoking a kind of life peculiar to the South, with its emphasis on grace, good manners and stoic endurance. Her fans will find Siddons's narrative charisma intact and blooming.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrator Dana Ivey is perfectly suited for this novel set in Charleston. Ivey reads the narrative passages in an authentic, understated Southern accent and is masterful in her vocalization of "the Scrubs," a group of lifelong friends. Her depiction of the group's informal leader, Camilla, puts the listener right in the seat of a horse-drawn carriage on Charleston's Battery. The "other" Charleston is personified in Camilla's unlikely assistant, Gaynelle, a motorcycle-riding country girl, for whom Ivey applies a nonaristocratic Low Country tone. Told from the viewpoint of Scrubs newcomer, Anny, the story takes a turn when the group must face some startling truths as their idyllic lives turn sour. J.J.B. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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