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Title: Highly affecting if somewhat romanticized
Review: As a Southern woman and the daughter of a schizophrenic, I read this book with particular interest. In places I was amazed to find my experiences described exactly, and the book was always affecting and detailed. However, coming from a situation in which the family came to economic ruin, and lives were destroyed by mental illness, I found the book in some ways too comfortable. A lucky family indeed that is gifted with the money, the isolated farmhouse, and the hired help to manage Maggie's illness the way it is managed! And lucky family whose mother's illness --as we are told at the very beginning of the novel -- is cured. Still, I admired the plainness with which Gibbons told her story, and the fact that she was not tempted -- as the author of _The Daughter of the Queen of Sheba_ was -- into pitching a parent's catastrophic mental illness as an empowering experience.
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