King's Oak

A woman flees a disastrous marriage to settle in a small, aristocratic town and falls in live with a young teacher determined to protect the surrounding wilderness from a nearby nuclear plant

At the heart of this intriguing but flawed, apocalyptic novel are Diana "Andy" Calhoun and her troubled young daughter. A refugee from a violently abusive marriage, Andy joins her stodgy college pal Tish in Pemberton, an exclusive, blue-blood, Southern community where everyone talks nonstop about guns, dogs, horses and hunting, but almost no one mentions the looming presence of Big Silver, the nuclear arms plant tucked into the woods. Despite her initial distaste for this lifestyle, Andy, "a squatty little Greek" who stands out like a sore thumb at patrician gatherings, is drawn into the polo-playing elite. She falls from grace when her overwhelming attraction to Tom Dabney, Pemberton's wild-eyed native son who has made the forest primeval his home, speculacularly ignites. When the arcane rites Tom practices can't save his beloved woodland from the nuclear destruction leaching from Big Silver, he wages war against his neighbors. Passion, dark atmosphere and vivid imagination color this dramatic narrative, but Siddons's ( Peachtree Road ) poetic prose is often overblown and it's hard to care about many of her wealthy, self-absorbed, essentially dull characters. 125,000 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo; BOMC alternate; author tour.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Best-selling author Siddons (Homeplace, LJ 4/1/87; Peachtree Road) jumps on the environmental bandwagon (with a backdrop of wife abuse) in her latest novel. Moving with her daughter to elite Georgia hunt country, Andy Calhoun is drawn (with agonizing slowness) to Tom Dabney, a "crazy" man passionately committed to the primeval woods where he lives. Finally succumbing to her attraction to Tom, she becomes involved with his efforts to save the woods from the nuclear wastes emanating from the Big Silver nuclear weapons plant. Siddons has a vivid imagination and conjures up an ancient religion whose practitioners are "at one with the woods." She picks up on some similar themes from her earlier novels (e.g., the old Southern elite versus the newly monied), but, on the whole, this is an overblown saga that lacks the romantic charm of Homeplace and the historical sweep of Peachtree Road. The larger-than-life characters aren't endearing enough to redeem it. BOMC alternate; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/90.
- Francine Fialkoff, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.