Shirley Abbott has truly captured the southern female experience, both past and present. Her vivid descriptions of her own family and her mother are the best parts of this book. The historical accounts of women from antebellum times to present are interesting, though not quite as engrossing as her own recollections. It is impossible not to regret the passing of an era in the south as one reads this book and realizes the complexities of women who were so often deemed simple hillbillies. Many women, like myself, who grew up in small southerns towns will recognize their own experiences as they follow the author's. I know I did. On occasion, Ms. Abbott wanders off into feminist interpretations that could get a little harsh. I didn't agree with all of her conclusions, but I really enjoyed reading this book.

Any Southern woman who has ever been tempted to transmogrify her prolific, feisty, cow-milking, chicken-plucking, garden-producing grandmothers into delicate, helpless ladies of the manor should read this book first. For in it, Shirley Abbott looks straight in the faces of the proud, independent, and powerful female descendants of the Scots-Irish migration to the Southern states and discovers something far more admirable than the Southern Belle.

In the process, she challenges such old-line interpretations of southern experience as that of W.J. Cash, who claimed the poor Scots-Irish immigrants who stepped off crowded ships at Charleston and Philadelphia fled inland in search of land that would permit them to become part of the English-American slave-holding, plantation-owning power structure of the Southern colonies. Nothing could be farther from the truth, Abbott argues convincingly: their experience had instilled in the Scots-Irish an abiding hatred of all things English, including the political and economic institutions the English established in centers like Charleston. These new immigrants preferred the terrifying, unexplored baclwoods, where they were free of English domination and what they conceived to be English decadence. The pioneer experience, reinforced by continuing poverty, a civil war, and the depredations of a occupying army only reinforced the pride and self-confidence these people brought with them to America.

In a well conceived study driven by her desire to place and understand her own poor, white, rural, and proud forebears, Abbott produces an elegant combination of memoir and cultural history. Her crystalline two-page account of the Scots-Irish trail to America is in itself worth the price of the book. And the memorable descriptions of the homes, tables, and characters of her Arkansas kinspeople demonstrate the consequences of that migration. For anyone wishing to understand Southern culture and southern women in particular, this small volume is a must-read. It takes the reader beyond stereotypes to a realistic picture of people whose lives are far more inspiring than that of any Belle, Sweet Potato Queen, or YaYa. I have spent my lifetime in the South and in the study of its literature and culture. Yet, I came away from this book with a deeper undersanding of the region and my own personal history in it.

I like to read this book once a year to remind me who I am and where I came from. I will never again be critical or ashamed of my rural mothers'and grandmothers' ways. I always feel like crying after I read this book--tears for their toil and for the disrespect society dealt them, but mostly, I cry a little for myself, too. I regret that I can't sit with them all around the table and hear their stories anymore, and I wish I could pile in the car like Shirley and her cousin to ride out to the cemetary to tend the graves. Abbott's story was familiar to me from the first page. I appreciate the opportunity to remember my maternal ancestors--the poor, white, uneducated, transient,hard working women of the south

In this memoir Shirley Abbott she tells her very personal story of her romance with romance. She has always studied great literature and so it is not accidental that the theme of great literary passions run throughout this book, contrasting sharply with her own experiences.

The book is a delight to read, full of nostalgic details of the popular culture around her as she grew up in the forties and fifties. It's a painfully honest book as she, with humor and insight, chronicles a lifetime of disappointing romances with strong commentary on the contemporary state of marriage. She comes across as very human and yet imperfect, and her appeal is to everyone who has ever believed in a fairytale.

There were times I was impatient with her. She kept waiting for romance to come to her, constantly searching for the perfect man. She looked at herself and her aspirations with humor, but never really took any positive actions. In spite of a career, two children and a marriage, and some tentative experiments with affairs, it took her until her sixties to seem to find that love.

This is more than a book about one human being however. It is the story of how the world we live in holds up an idealized version of romance which is echoed in great literature. And how the search for this romance is doomed to failure.

The book is hard to put down. I looked forward to reading it and was sorry to see it end. She's a good writer and I appreciate the way her words fall across the page, leading me on and letting me share her life.

I hope Love's Apprentice won't be considered one of the undifferentiated, self-exploiting memoirs that are published by the dozens these days because it is an astonishing book: It is history and literature; witty and poignant; deeply humane, and astonishingly brave. It describes, through example, the facets of both youthful and mature love. Were 5 stars not reserved for my pantheon of Great Writers (Tolstoy, George Eliot, Nabokov), this book would have rated higher. Read it. Tell your friends.

At first glance, this might look like it has more to say to your wife, lover, or sister, but I can assure you it will be worth your time to read this for yourself. AT 50, with two marriages behind me, I found it quite fascinating, and often confirming in regard to what was, and is, going on in my relationships with women. I am, of course recommending it to my therapist giflfriend. I recommend it to you for insigh, style, and grace.