Carolina Girl: A Writer's Beginning

by Idella Bodie

Through the years, Idella Bodie has visited many schools to speak with young readers about her books and one of the most popular questions she receives is What was your life like when you were growing up? To show the way things were, she has gathered memories, not just of her life but the lives of people in her small South Carolina hometown of Ridge Spring.
An entertaining account of "one writer's beginning." Re-creating real people and places, Bodie takes the reader back to the 1930s and her childhood on a small South Carolina farm. Growing up during the Great Depression and World War II is depicted in rich detail with tender simplicity and occasional humor

238 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1998

Reviews

[Kaitlyn Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I very much enjoyed this book. I picked it up just as something to entertain me as my girls and I hung out at the library on a rainy afternoon, and didn’t have very high expectations. It pleasantly surprised me as a well written autobiography.
Easy to read, it was descriptive enough that I get I got a better sense of the time period without it feeling long and bogged down. It was also fun to be able to picture the familiar places around South Carolina she mentioned in the book and trying to imagine what they would have liked back then.
Would definitely make a good book for middle or high schoolers to read to learn about what life was like in the rural south in the 1930s.