Very good book to read --- Enjoyed it ( )

LOVED this book! I enjoyed all the James Harriott novels, but honestly, this one was better.

The protag. is a woman, and a Southerner. McSparren had me laughing and crying all through the book - sometimes both at the same time.

The characters are so real I feel like I could drive down to see them.

A wonderful Women's Fiction novel. I highly recommend it. ( )

A great story, well written, It kept calling me back...
I couldn't wait to see what they were up to next! ( )

Maggie was raised to be a Southern Belle, but she only wanted to be a veterinarian from the time she worked for a vet to pay off a bill for a half-drowned puppy. She struggled through the man's world of veterinary school in the 60's, and the book follows the story of her life, love, career and family. It is a good story but without that attention-grabbing quality of James Herriott (to whom all veterinary stories must be compared). ( )

_Finally_ read this book. I started it right after I got it (from Early Readers), and stalled on the first chapter. I've started and stalled at the same place half a dozen times in the...several years since I got it. But this time I powered through, and got through the entire book. And it's good! I enjoyed reading it, and I may well reread. Pity it took me so long. The stories are good - events in a vet's life, which are always interesting and frequently amusing (I like Herriot too). The events in her personal life - from sexism in college (and later) to her marriage, children, and widowhood while working as an independent vet, to her waffling on whether to retire - are also interesting, though mostly much less amusing. I kept trying to decide if it was a memoir or fiction, and couldn't figure it out - there's an afterword, however, in which the author explains that while all the stories are true, the characters are all fictional. Very nicely done, since I couldn't determine whether it was true or not! As a vet, Maggie works with both small and large animals - dogs and cats, horses and cattle. And buffalo, and wolves, and monkeys...but not often. Miracle recoveries, accidental deaths and deaths due to incompetence, weird and wonderful problems mostly solved. Her personal life is less smooth, and less interesting to me. Not bad, but a lot of cases where two or more people act reasonably by their own lights and end up on a collision course. Not particularly enjoyable to read, though in several cases the collision powered the story down the line. Overall enjoyable, and probably worth a reread (to catch what I missed the first time through!). ( )