5 h 43 minAudiobook6 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at cost
Audiobook edition · 5 h 43 minPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
A mother can mend a broken geranium and cut through a neighbor’s pretensions with equal precision.
In Sido & The Tendrils of the Vine, Colette brings together two works shaped by childhood, memory, and the natural world. In Sido, she recalls her mother’s quick hands, sharp judgments, and fierce attachment to village life. Paris offers pleasures, but home has its own authority. Through a daughter’s attentive eyes, a familiar room becomes a place of wonder.
Sido returns from Paris with chocolate, violet perfume, and stories of theaters and shops. Yet a damaged geranium catches her eye amid the unpacking, and she supports its stem with cardboard and golden cord. Colette sets this tenderness beside her mother’s comic severity. A request to wear summer socks becomes a clash between village pride and Parisian fashion.
What you’ll discover
- A mother in motion Meet Sido through her restless gestures, piercing observations, and sudden acts of care.
- The scent of home Perfume, fresh bread, and raspberry jam give remembered family life a vivid physical presence.
- Paris meets the village Enjoy the friction between Sido’s provincial loyalties and her lively appetite for the capital.
- Freedom in the garden Follow Sido outside, where living plants ease the irritation that household chores stir.
- A daughter looks closely Discover how Colette finds feeling in a repaired stem and her mother’s returning glance.
Who will love it
You will love this if you enjoy sensory writing about gardens, weather and animals, if family portraits draw you in, or if you like short pieces about love, friendship and the stage in Paris.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Sido rules her house and garden
- The winds and weather are her guides
- A child who loves the dawn
- Her mother's fierce, free spirit
- The Captain and his hidden songs
- Two savages and their gifts
- Tendrils: a voice found in solitude
- Animals speak and friends confide
- Claudine, the sea and the stage
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- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
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Sido y los zarcillos de la vid in 25 languages, side by side, paragraph by paragraph, once the book texts are online: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Sido y los zarcillos de la vid
by Colette
A mother in a Burgundy garden answers the winds, talks to blackbirds and rules a village from her flower beds.
Medium level5–10 hours to read25 languages
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In short
Picture a woman who greets the wind by name and calls up to a neighbor hidden in a cloud. That is Sido, the mother of the French writer Colette, who died in 1954.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Sido rules her house and garden
The book opens with Sido giving verdicts. Colette says these verdicts had a strange authority.
Sido is a true provincial, but she keeps one eye on Paris. Every two years or so she travels there for a week. She comes home with chocolate, violet perfume and costly gloves, and she describes the whole city to her family.
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What is Sido by Colette about?
It is a portrait of her mother, Sido, and of her childhood in a Burgundy village. It also draws her one-legged father, the Captain, and her two brothers, the savages, with many scenes of gardens, weather and animals.
Who was Sido in real life?
Sido is Colette's mother. Colette says only her father calls her Sido. She was a keen gardener and observer of nature, and she shaped her daughter's love of the natural world.
What does The Tendrils of the Vine mean?
It comes from a fable in the opening piece, where a nightingale is bound by vine tendrils while asleep and stays awake singing. Colette uses it to show how she found her own voice.
The author
Colette
1873–1954 · French novelist
Colette was a French novelist born in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye in 1873. She later lived in Paris, where she died in 1954. Her novels include Chéri, published in 1920, and The Ripening Seed, published in 1923. She also wrote Sido, published in 1930, and worked as a journalist and stage performer.
More by Colette
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