Customer Reviews

King's Oak

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

It was so refreshing to read a book that focuses on an alternative life in a positive way. Many people are now into seeking lifestyles and a spiritual path that will help them grow and learn. Often these choices are tied to the environment and helping our planet survive. This is the underlying theme of King's Oak. Even tho the book was written almost 10 year ago, the concerns and issues raised are more important now than ever before. Siddons could have probably chopped almost 100 pages off, it does get tedious after while, but I found myself involved and caring about the characters and the land. I would highly recommend King's Oak, especially to those who have never read Siddons before or to book clubs who would love to have something meaty and relevant to discuss.

I bought the book because I so loved Hill Towns and Outer Banks and Downtown, but I didn't read it for a while because it sounded sort of dopey and I don't care for hunting. I finally started it and was swept into another world. It's full of compelling, fascinating people and the plot is surprising and touching. Just like Andy, I started out despising hunters and thought that nothing could change my mind. I loved it, it's one of her best and I don't know why I put off enjoying the book.

There aren't too many things I hate more than to get engrossed in what seems to be a pretty good book, only to have the author turn into a moron at the end and blow it. Such is the case with "King's Oak". The first 400 pages are pretty good, but the last 100 -- Yow! Should you decide to read this book, stop at the point where the water starts to glow and the baby goat dies. From that point on it's for idiots only.

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.

This was a disappointing tale from a writer I long to love because of my southern roots. The story was unbelievable - the trauma suffered by the protagonist's daughter just didn't seem significant enough to warrant her almost wasting away from depression. Logic was missing throughout the book. I do enjoy Siddons' descriptions of uniquely southern landscapes and customs (therefore 2 stars) but her stereotyping of southern eccentrics is tiresome.

I have read 6 other Siddons books and enjoyed them in varying degrees, however this one was such drudgery to get through that I had to make myself finish it. I, like another reviewer stated, get tired of her portrayal of southerners and their always exaggerated personalities. The characters were barely tolerable much less someone we liked. I also agreed with other reviews that the daughter's condition was out of proportion with the "trauma" she suffered. It will be awhile before I read this author again.

I've read several other books by Siddons and liked them all but this was one of the worst novels I've read in a long time.

If you can manage to plow through the forest of pontificating on wildlife and the environment not to mention a bizarre take on the writings of philosopher Martin Buber, you'll find characters whose actions and motivations make no sense and a plot that has no logic whatsoever. Much of the plot hangs on incidents that rub every which of a way against common sense, starting with a main character who is supposedly emotionally and sexually traumatized by her marriage but hops into bed with two of the male characters, a child who is severely emotionally damaged by the killing of a pet who finds her inner hunter, and my personal favorite, a character in crisis because he can't prove pollution has occurred because it never occurs to anyone to test off the site of the industrial/military plant suspected of the polluting. This includes the character's own failure to have the waters on his own land retested after first test results go missing.

Skip this one and get Islands or Nora, Nora instead.

BTW, contrary to one of the reviews here, there are no forest rangers in this book.

I've read most of ARS's books and she's sort of hit-or-miss, but this one's great! The characters are very real. Yes, they're flawed and sometimes behave illogically, but that's because they're human! The sexual tension between Andy and Tom was palpable. Yes, I did feel as if Andy was behaving a little inappropriately in front of her 11-year-old daughter, but that's a minor quibble. I think Tom Dabney is the most fascinating, compelling male character in fiction since Rhett Butler. This book and the author's "Peachtree Road" are not to be missed!

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

I've read 15 million books this summer. This one was left at a hotel in Maui and I traded it for two Nora Roberts. The previous reviews didn't do this book justice. I have been a Siddons fan for years but this one just engrossed me and I lived and breathed it. Maybe I am one with the woods also. I never thought this was true of me but I will send it to my daughter to read and as an adult Hillary, I will await her opinion.