Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

from mchwest

This book attracted me because the author grew up in the South. Her childhood, although seems challenging, was not a lot different from mine. Her great confidant, Willie Bell, was a southern maid through and through just like the one who helped raise me, right down to the oven toast and egg! Her ...

from Bookaddict45

I enjoyed reading Frances Mayes's memoir Under Mangolia. The writing was very poetic and beautiful. Her descriptions of her home town, southern culture and food was very detailed, and made it very easy to close your eyes and imagine exactly the scenes she had described. The different quotes and p...

from etxgardener

Frances Mayes rocketed to fame with her book Under the Tuscan Sun that can rightly be categorized as lifestyle pornography for middle-aged women. After mining this topic for years, she has now turned to her home turf, the American South, in a memoir that describes her southern Gothic childhood co...

from LNDuff

I had trouble finishing this book. Not because the content was troubling, though some of it was sad. Not because the writing wasn't good; some of it was lovely, incandescent, evoking colors and scents along with events from Mayes's past. Much, though, felt overwrought, overworked, overthought. Ma...

from Beamis12

A charming and thoughtful meditation of her youth growing up in Fitzgerald, Ga. Although she early escaped to California and fell in love with Tuscany, buying a house there, it only takes a trip to do a reading at Square Books in Oxford, MS., to bring back much of what it means to be Southern. Sh...