An unforgettable story of love, acceptance, and tradition.

When Maude Chambliss first arrives at Retreat, the seasonal home of her husband's aristocratic family, she is a nineteen-year-old bride fresh from South Carolina's Low Country. Among the patrician men and women who reside in the summer colony on the coast of Maine, her gypsy-like beauty and impulsive behavior immediately brand her an outsider. She, as well as everyone else, is certain she will never fit in. And of course, she doesn't...at first.

But over the many summers she spends there, Maude comes to cherish life in the colony, as she does the people who share it with her. There is her husband Peter, consumed with a darkness of spirit; her adored but dangerously fragile children; her domineering mother-in-law, who teaches her that it is the women who posses the strength to keep the colony intact; and Maine native Micah Willis, who is ultimately Maude's truest friend.

This brilliant novel, rich with emotion, is filled with appealing, intense, and indomitable characters. Anne Rivers Siddons paints a portrait of a woman determined to preserve the spirit of past generations--and the future of aplaice where she became who she is...a place called Colony.

"An outstanding multigenerational novel...We are hooked from the moment we meet Maude."
The New York Times

Customer Rating:
Summary: excellent
Comment: I forgot about this book and wanted to re read it. it was a great read, depth, love, passion, tears and smiles. what a great revisit.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent book!!
Comment: This is one of Anne Rivers Siddons best. Great book with a wonderful twist. Her characters are so real life. My only "complaint" about her (and it's not much of a complaint) is that you need a dictionary next to you when you read any of her books. It's a bit superfluous (see what I mean?). I had a hard time putting this book down. I heartedly recommend this.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Colony
Comment: I Loved the book, but when I got to the end part of the book was missing.
I had to get another book from my bookclub to finish the book. It would have cost to much to return.
Jonie

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: A Well written novel about a repulsive character
Comment: Ann Rivers Siddons does a good job of recreating a dysfunctional family and how toxicity reverberates throughout generations; unfortunately, one gets the impression that Siddons is unconscious of the dysfunction and expects us to admire her main character. I was left wondering how autobiographical the work was. While the story is engaging and the prose poetic, Siddons introduces a textbook codependent relationship and wants us to buy this as a model of transcedent love. Sorry for the spoiler but in the end we discover that Maude murdered a baby, allowed her son to take the blame for her husband's misdeed, and allowed the spirit of her daughter to be destroyed but, hey, she did it all for codependency er, I mean love. I confess that I always used Siddons as light reading; her novels are hardly Pulitzer material and her women are far from our society's most enlightened beings (with the exception of "Smokey" in "Downtown") but her books provided good escapism. I was so repulsed by this book that I have sworn off Siddons. One word sufficiently summarizes-EWWWWW....

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Interesting & Enjoyable
Comment: This book was interesting to read, it covered several generations of families and time periods. It was quite long, but it was never boring. One thing that got a little repetitive was that only bad things seemed to happen during the summers, while the families were summering in Maine. Also, it did seem like MANY depressing and tragic things happened to the family. The characters were very real due to the descriptions, situations and dialogue, but especially because the reader knows them their entire lives. The setting in Maine was also extremely descriptive, and by the end of the story I had the entire colony mapped out in my mind. The ending included some twists and surprises that I honestly did not see coming. Overall it was an enjoyable read and I will definately read more by this author in the future.

---