COLONY, by Anne Rivers Siddons, HarperCollins, 466 pages, $20.

Anne Rivers Siddons is a Southern writer, so it was somewhat of a surprise to note her newest book is set in Maine. Siddons has spent summers at Cape Rosier in Penobscot Bay for many years, and explained in a recent interview with Publishers Weekly that she wanted to preserve the nature and spirit of the “summer colony” while such colonies still exist.

Siddons does a good job of this, taking the reader inside the lives of the privileged few who spend their leisure time at these Maine retreats. She gives a clear and not always pleasant picture of lives governed by propriety and money, where heritage is all-important and little else matters:

“… Many of the men who came to Retreat and those other Maine oases of the day were great powers in life and economy of their cities and, in some cases, the nation. Many were the heads of businesses and industries whose names shone on other shores than that rocky one; others were greatly distinguished in their professions or simply the heirs to large personal fortunes. I never met a `summer’ man in Retreat or anywhere else in Maine who did not have extraordinary resources of some sort at his disposal, or the eventual prospect of them.”

Maude Gascoigne Chambliss is a transplanted Southerner who marries into a New England family and suddenly finds herself thrust into a society foreign to her experience. Her struggles to adapt, to make a place for herself and to become acepted within her new family — while remaining true to her own South Carolina heritage — are the focus of this multigenerational book which ranges from Maude as a 17-year-old swept off her feet at the Saint Cecelia Ball by a dashing young man from Princeton to her fulfilling the role of grande dame of the family.

Some of the most pleasurable moments in “Colony” occur when Siddons writes about Maine; the reader immediately senses her love, respect, and even awe for her summer home:

“`I never saw anything so beautiful,’ I said to Peter finally. … `And it looks like it could easily kill you. Peter, it’s all so … sharp.’

“He looked at me and smiled. `I know what you mean. But it’s just what you’ll come to love about it. It’s … all open to you. It keeps nothing back. It shows you its teeth and spine and breath, and in the end something in you rises up to meet and match it. It never coddles you, but in the end it gets the best out of you. And it gives you its best. It clears away a lot of unnecessary stuff, this coast, this place …”

Siddons is well at home with the geography of Penobscot Bay, although she does indicate in an author’s note that she has used free rein in moving things around a bit when she felt the need. She speaks with authority about Castine, South Brooksville, Blue Hill and Brooklin, but wavers when she tackles Mount Desert

In one unfortunate, awkward moment she has a character suggest they “… go berrying, and clam digging, and over to Bar Harbor in one day, and have dinner at the Astinicou Inn.” This is the kind of error that sets Mainers’ teeth on edge, and is all the more regrettable because it so easily could have been put right with a simple check of the local phone book: Aha! It’s the Asticou Inn, and it’s in Northeast Harbor.

Fortunately, such incidents are few, and for the most part the reader is content to sit back and be swept away to a different time and a part of Maine with which most of us are largely unfamiliar, and settle in for a leisurely summer read that chronicles what Maude Chambliss did for love. The book is readable and fun, a comfortable way to spend one of the last days of our rapidly waning summer.

Janet C. Beaulieu is a free-lance writer who resides in Bangor.