Sweetwater Creek

I am listening to the audio and the reader is great and the story is very satisfying.

6/08 Young girl, Emily- coming of age lives with father who raises hunting spaniels-mother deserted them when Emily very young. Lulu Foxworth comes to stay one summer--she needs to get away from her wealthy family and abusive boyfriend. She befriends Emily--first true friend Emily has had. Tells

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her her addictions and asks Emily 's help in overcoming. Father and boyfriend show up and Lulu dissappears.--Emily devastated. Buries herself in her uncanny relationship with the dogs she is entrusted to train. Father finally sees daughter with all her talents, they become closer through the help of Emily's Aunt Jenny.

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I absolutely loved this book. Will be buying it as a gift for friends - that says it all.

At the end of our visits, my mother-in-law supplies me with bags of books she has read and no longer wishes to keep—it’s wonderful. Though we don’t always read the same sorts of books, I’m always able to score all sorts of things to read and many to immediately post on bookmooch. In fact,

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virtually all of her books I’ve posted there are mooched within a week or two, whereas my selections often sit there for months and sometimes years. She apparently has much more widely held tastes than I do. At the bottom of the most recent, large shopping bag full of treasures, I found [[Anne Rivers Siddon’s]] [Sweetwater Creek]. I had been wanting to dip into a quintessential southern novel after having read an interview of Southern author [[Pat Conroy]], so it was perfect timing.

It took me a while to get into the slow, but steady, drawl of the plot. The book concerns a prepubescent girl’s plight to come of age in tension filled circumstances. She is being raised by a father—He loves her but hates how much she reminds him of her absentee mother and is ill equipped to try to help her mature—and brothers, who share a couple of sweaty, pulsating brain cells between the two of them. That characterization should probably be softened as they too have been deprived of their mother’s presence for most of their lives. The lack of information provided about where their mother ended up and what she ended up doing was sort of irritating, though, the author implies that she is alive, somewhere. The prepubescent girl “finds” herself with the assistance of primarily her aunt Jenny and a young woman named Lulu. Though I didn’t love this novel, the descriptions of the Southern heat, the water, the smells, the foods etc. were simply intoxicating.

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I am conflicted about this book. It was nicely written with excellent description of the southern low country however the character Lulu was a bit over the top for me. Could not quite believe in her and her addictions being so destructive. With all her money she could have paid for some therapy

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rather than rely on a 12 year old girl to help her. A little too unbelievable for me.

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a good chick book to get lost in.

At twelve, Emily Parmenter knows about loneliness only too well. Left mostly to herself after her beautiful young mother disappeared and her beloved older brother died, Emily is keenly aware of yearning and loss. Rather than let the sadness consume her, she has built a life around the faded

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plantation where her remote father and hunting-obsessed brothers raise the legendary Lowcountry Boykin hunting spaniels. To some, it may seem that she lives within a meager, narrow, masculine world, but to Emily that life holds its own special magic: the storied deep-sea dolphins who regularly come to frolic and play in Sweetwater Creek; her extraordinary bond with the beautiful dogs she trains; her almost mystical communion with her own spaniel, Elvis; the dreaming old Lowcountry itself. Emily hides from the dreaded world here. For her, it is enough.

And then along comes Lulu Foxworth, troubled daughter of a truly grand plantation, who has run away from her hectic debutante season in Charleston to spend a healing summer with the quiet marshes and river, and the life-giving dogs. Where Emily's father sees their guest as an entree into a society he thought forever out of reach, Emily is at once threatened and utterly mystified. Lulu has a powerful enchantment and a charm of her own, and this, along with the dark, crippling secret she brings with her, will inevitably blow Emily's magical water world apart and let the real one in - but at a terrible price.

In my opinion, this book was just alright. I found the story to be a bit too long; with too many descriptive passages for my liking. Ultimately, the book boasted a promising build up to a rather disappointing ending in my opinion. My feelings might just be because of the type of mood I was in while reading, but this book never fully delivered on its promise for me. It was a bit of a disappointment for me, because I've read several other books by this author that I absolutely loved, but I had to give Sweetwater Creek by Anne Rivers Siddons a B+!

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coming of age novel about a girl on a dog raising plantation, who has lost her mother, her older brother and during the story, an older girl hding from her demons on the plantation

the south — rich + poor — dog trainer + children — strange border —

At twelve, Emily Parmenter knows alone all too well. Left mostly to herself after her beautiful young mother disappeared and her beloved older brother died, Emily is keenly aware of yearning and loss. Rather than be consumed

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by sadness, she has built a life around the faded plantation where her remote father and hunting-obsessed brothers raise the legendary Lowcountry Boykin hunting spaniels. It is a meager, narrow, masculine world, but to Emily it has magic: the storied deep-sea dolphins who come regularly to play in Sweetwater Creek; her extraordinary bond with the beautiful dogs she trains; her almost mystic communion with her own spaniel, Elvis; the dreaming old Lowcountry itself. Emily hides from the dreaded world here. It is enough.

Show Less