Some Day You'll Thank Me for This, The Official Southern Ladies' Guide to Being a "Perfect" Mother, by Gayden Metcalf and Charlotte Hays. Humor. Hardback. 256 pages.

This was a rather random Christmas present from my mother. I think she thought it would be funnier to me than it was, because we used to joke about Southern manners a lot while I was growing up. But she is not a Southern Mother, nor am I a Southern Daughter, and we most assuredly have not adopted that culture. I do write thank-you notes, sometimes, but that's about it.

In addition to not having a Southern Mother, I also have not been consistently exposed to Southern culture from friends or forced co-location. The farthest South that I've lived was for college at Virginia Tech, and even then, my roommates were from NoVA, Maryland, and Connecticut. I never pledged a sorority. So while some of the descriptions were funny even outside of Southern situations (cross-eyed bears!), I think a lot of the humor was too contextual for me to truly enjoy the way it was intended.

The other disappointment of this book - for me - is that almost a third of it is taken up with recipes rather than writing. While that might be lovely if you actually care about cucumber sandwiches and wedding cookies, it did little for me. I stopped actually reading the recipes about three chapters into the book. So while the page count was 256, it was really more like 160 pages of descriptive content.

I recommend this book to people who are immersed in the South, or have been there long enough to pretend.

Books read in 2013