Customer Reviews

Peachtree Road

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

"Peachtree Road" is a romantic tale of a southern gentleman and a strong-willed, black-haired southern beauty set against changing times in the South. Another "Gone With the Wind"? No, not by a long-shot! This time the story takes place in the aristocratic homes of Atlanta's wealthiest residents during the changing and turbulent years of the 20th century.

Young Lucy Bondurant comes to live in the home of her cousin, Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant III, and takes him and everyone she knows, including the reader, on a roller coaster ride through life. "Gibby" is torn between his love and duty for his cousin and his romantic love for another woman. The results are tragic for him ... or is he fulfilling his destiny? You, as the reader, must decide.

This book is very long (over 800 pages), but worth the time. Revel in the character development. Savor the relationship you will build with the characters for you will be with them from childhood until death. Speed through the streets on bikes behind Lucy, whoop it up with the Pinks and Jells, march with the Civil Rights Movement and cry through the tragedies that no one is immune from -- not even the very rich.

This is one of the best books I've ever read. Though I desperately wanted to see how it concluded, I felt like I had lost my best friend when I was done.

Like only this author can be. Lucy and Shep Bondurant are cousins that are clearly headed on a path to destruction from the opening chapter of this book. When Lucy comes to live in the Atlanta house with Gibbs's family she takes his heart and breath away. From this meeting of two lonely children a strong lifelong bond grows, one that will go beyond words and even death.

Siddons writes with a style of her own, beautiful, rambling, expressive prose that leaves you feeling the heat and charm of Atlanta and it's nobility. Her characters are not always likable but they are intensely human, making them more than just cardboard cut heroes and heroines. I enjoy the incredible way this author puts the reader in the scene.

I have enjoyed several of this authors book's. My favorite, and the jewel in her crown, as my friend Rachel once put it, is COLONY a book that will warm your heart for years to come. Kelsana 5/26/02

If, as Anne Rivers Siddons insinuates in the opening lines of this novel, the South killed Lucy Bondurant, then no one need ever take responsibility for their bizarre actions and dysfunctional behavior. Just blame it on your hometown. Hogwash, Ms. Siddons! You have given us much better than this cop-out.

Lucy and her mother, brother, and sister are seemingly abandoned by Lucy's father and this fact haunts her for her entire life as she searches for a father figure everywhere. When her family takes up residence with wealthy relatives, she forms a bond of love and hate with her cousin Shep. The fact that she ruins his life while destroying every chance at happiness he ever has, the fact that she is amoral, self-centered, and totally without real love for anyone cannot be blamed so easily on the fact that Atlanta emerged from a sleepy Southern hamlet to become one of the country's greatest metropolitan areas. There were too many other abandoned children (and worse) who turned into fine, upstanding adults in spite of early misfortunes.

In addition to Lucy being totally unlikeable as a heroine, it was the narrator Shep who made me sick with his pushover personality. He enables Lucy every page of the novel and, amazingly, never sees her for the troublesome, demented woman she becomes. Poor Shep the doormat.

Despite two highly unlikeable characters taking center stage in this novel, the story might be interesting since it is set in a pivotal time-frame of American history and one which today's aging baby boomers are very familiar with---Camelot, the assassination of JFK, the Civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King's dream, etc. However, it slogs painfully along for about 400 pages before things really begin to happen. Where were the editors on this one?

As I moved into the final 200 of 800+ pages, I began to think that maybe this was a pretty good book after all. That's before the author knocked the wind out of me by ending with such ambiguity that I'm not sure what really happened. So now I am desperately searching for friends, enemies, anyone who read this book and begging them to enlighten me as to what *really* happened in the last two paragraphs.

It's a compelling read, I'll grant you that. I'll even give Siddons the benefit of the doubt in terms of her impenetrable, twining prose, with its repetitions and endless subordinate clauses -- if it's an intentional metaphor for the suffocating Southern setting. (If it's not intentional, then she needed a better editor). But she fails utterly in projecting her protagonist, Lucy, as a sympathetic character. We never see this woman as the "essential flame" (Siddons' nauseating adjective, used incessantly)she's supposed to be or the enchantment she supposedly casts. In her actions and words, she's amoral, selfish, egotistical, endlessly destructive. Siddons has forgotten a cardinal rule of characterization here: show, don't tell. In other words, other characters tell us how wonderful she is; the author never "shows" us, through Lucy's actions or through incidents, that she's wonderful.

Siddons' analysis of Lucy's motivation is equally weak. Before I was halfway through the book, I was sick of the premise that her father's desertion and "the South" had wrecked Lucy and made her what she was. All I could think was, "Get over it!" Her death is supposed to be a tragic symbolic of what the South does to its women. The reaction it engendered in me was relief that she'd _finally_ been killed off!

The author spent the first half of the book switching between setting up the characters and foreshadowing the rest of the book. She takes long passages to describe places and even events that end up with no bearing on the story.

I'm glad to see other reviewers saying that they were disappointed by this book because I bought two Siddons books at the same time. I hope I like the other book better than this one.

THE ENDING: I think Shep jumps from the bridge landing safely in the water and then is finally able to have a relationship with Sarah. By reliving (and changing) the day at the bridge so long ago, he's able to symolically free himself of Lucy. I don't think he was suicidal at all.

I have read this book at least three times so far, and whenever I see a copy of it in a used book store, I buy it so that I'll have extras to loan to my friends. It IS long, but you'll be surprised how fast the book goes. It's a fascinating study both of the Southern way of life and of a dysfunctional relationship -- well, there are actually many of those in the book, but I refer specifically to Shep's love/hate relationship with his cousin Lucy, a beautiful, smart, and self-destructive woman who is permanently scarred by her father's desertion (which is what brings Lucy, her siblings, and their mother to live with Shep and his parents). My only complaint about the book is that I felt Sarah was depicted as some sort of a saint, and I really didn't like her that much . . . Overall, this is a great book, and I can guarantee that you'll find yourself thinking back to the characters for a long time after reading it.

Peachtree Road is like an extremely tall ice tea on a blistering southern day. It is long, and drawn out at times, but so cool and refreshing. If you do not like descriptive narrative this book may not work for you. Personally, I think that it it exemplifies the southern tradition of storytelling. Life down there is (was) a bit slower and everyone takes their time with things. Yes, it did take a while to hook into the story, but having read Siddons before I knew that her characters are so vivid that it would be worth it. I found the lonliness of Shep very disturbing and ultimately got a bit fed up with Lucy. Still, I can almost hear her voice as she calls him on the phone. Being an optimist, I like to think that he did find some peace with Sarah. I loved the ending of the book and I think that Siddons achieved a monumentous task. If you enjoy a deep emotional read than this book will deliver.

This book was filled with so many descriptive phrases and asides in most sentences, that the original intent of the sentence was often lost. I could say I read this book twice during my read through it because I had to reread so much of it to grasp the intended meaning. I was afraid to jump ahead because I thought I would miss some critical point to the ending. I, also, was bumfuzzled regarding the ending. Were we meant to know the ending or is each reader to decide his own ending?

I have read several of Mrs. Siddon's other books and found them to be totally interesting and filled with drama. This book could have been written with 1/3 of the words, I feel.

Thank you Ms. Siddons! I haven't enjoyed a book like this since I read The Prince of Tides. It was Conroy's quote on the cover, "the Southern novel for our generation," that prompted me to read it. I am so glad I did!! I haven't laughed and cried during a read in some time. The characters are as real as rain...they will not leave me ever. The plot is artfully crafted. I urge readers to read the book from cover to cover if you have a deep interest in the South and enjoy a good story...it's a journey worth taking! Having schooled at Vanderbilt, I can testify to the accuracy of Siddons's portrayal of the wealthy South.

This was the first of her books which I read, and through all the years, I still go back and read portions of it every year or so. Amid all the melodrama is a well written story with interesting characters, all damaged in their own ways, but with compelling stories to tell. And given what happened the day I write this, that an Air France Concorde had crashed while leaving Paris, unable to get altitude, I think I am going to read it again.