Best of the Best from the Mid-South Cookbook: Selected Recipes from the Favorite Cookbooks of Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia Book

A party planning book for the "southern gal" that would have been a lot better if the author didn't read it herself. She has one of those old southern women accents, if you can call it that, where they seem to constantly have saliva in the pockets of their mouth and you can hear it swishing with each syllable. On top of that they like to not touch their tongue to the top of the roof of their mouth, thereby limiting the sounds actual culmination, at least the ones that actually require these parts of your mouth to touch like "L" and "t" sounds. There's a lot. Just pay attention to yourself talking and you'll see what I mean. Then try and do it without moving your tongue up and put a lot of spit in the sides of your mouth and you've got this freaking audiobook. It also makes one think that possibly their dentures are lose. This kind of talking annoys me to no end. Especially after years of trying to teach proper speech and language to illiterate adults. Literate adults should be ashamed. Speak properly. You're doing a disservice to your fellow less educated man. Since I have only ever heard southern women in their 60s and 70s speak this way imagine my shock when she confessed her age in the book. It was in the early 50 range. Shock!

Lastly, this unfortunate lingering spit pocket on the sides of her mouth lead you to hear things incorrectly. That or she doesn't know what she's saying, tiring and fatigue in reading is common in poor narrators. Their pronunciation becomes sloppy. At one time she said "goods yet" and it sounded for all the world like "good shit" WHAT? There were several of this type of problem. She kept saying "Out Blinded" I realized she meant "Out Blonded" but she wanted to make the O sound an I. I wrote a few down until I realized there were too many examples. I stopped. It was depressing me.

This book is also poorly delivered. Jokes fall flat. Then she kicks them for good measure ensuring you wince instead of laugh. A well trained narrator would have been able to pull off this book with a sense of elegance and charm that is necessary for this type of nonfic to come across acceptably as an audiobook. Worse she does that horrible thing that poor readers of audios do. You know that. Period. In the middle of. A sentence. Where there should. n't. be one and you think what. In the world where they thinking reading reading it as if there were periods where everyone. knows there aren't any. This is a common mistake of authors who should not be reading their own books, but insist on doing so.

So now that we've critiqued the bad reading, the bad spitty talking, the bad pronunciation of common words lets move onto the content- DONT get this as an audiobook. Look you can flip through this trite junk easily enough. I think there were a few good recipes in there. A few good pieces of advice too, but honestly most of it was for an antiquated way of living that most women in the south don't live in. Unless you're from Mountain Brook or over the mountain somewhere had have lots of money or are a debutant or are aspiring to be one just get a Paula Dean, or Southern Living entertaining book and skip this one. She was condescending about men (their idiots and just want to drink beer eat pizza and be stupid), her mother in laws, and behaved and talked in a way that I just couldn't relate to. If you want a shallow book with a few good recipes then this one is for you! Just don't get the audio book mkay?