This is the recollections of Marjorie Rawlings about life in the Everglades. She breaks her time there into 23 chapters full of descriptive prose as she covers cooking, hunting, witchcraft, interactions with neighbors, wildlife, geography, flora and fauna and what it was like to have hired dark people to maintain her house and orange grove.

I loved the meat of this book but I thought the description was a bit on the dross side. Unless you are planning a visit to Florida or live there, a lot of it will go out the ears. The story also seemed choppy , as if the vignettes could have connected better. That being said, Ms. Rawlings is a great storyteller and I finished all this book and will be glad I read it and have it to refer to should there ever be a need. ( )

I started this one yesterday and found it a tough read. It's set in Florida in the 50s, I think, and the racial stereotypes are very much from that era. It's one thing to read it in Huck Finn, or something like that, where it's characters talking. But when it's a memoir and the writer calls someone a 'darky' I just can't stomach that. I gave up on this one. I have an old copy of the book that might have belonged to my mom when she was young. I'm going to give it back to her if she wants it, and the thrift store if not. ( )

Such delicious writing and such flavorful information on an area of the state Ilived in for 1 and 1/2 years, just 9 miles from the Creek on Little Orange Lake. This novel encompasses the stories that wound up a screen play with actor Rip Torn and Mary Steenbergen playing Majorie, and then have another book within a book later published as part of "Cross Creek Cooking." Finally, there is that wonderful trip from the headwaters of the St. John following an extensive breqkdown on florq and fauna through the four seasons. Somehow, Majorie identifies three of the four as separate seasons. Almost 45 years here and II still cannot do that., but after reading this, I now know where to look. Simply the best piece of Floridana I've read to date. ( )

Cross Creek is the memoir of Marjorie Rawlings, Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Yearling, when she lived on her farm in central Florida. Originally published in 1942, Rawlings settled in Florida after she divorced her husband in 1933. Cross Creek documents Rawlings’ joys and challenges of handling the wild Florida nature, weather and citizens. Written in an easy, humorous style, Rawlings transports her readers to the place of hammocks and hurricanes, rattlesnake crossings and mewing cows, and orange blossoms and sand.

Each chapter of her memoir reads like a short story, covering a certain topic. There are chapters devoted to all four seasons. Other individual chapters discuss snakes, bugs, her neighbors and her house. Rawlings is in her element when she writes about nature, and as a fellow Floridian, I can “see’ what Rawlings wrote about in her memoir. Readers of The Yearling would not be a stranger to Rawlings’ natural writing style – and would feel at home reading Cross Creek.

Many readers, however, may be uncomfortable with Rawlings’s depiction of her African-American workers. The writer employed blacks to work in her home and groves, and she often had a difficult time managing her staff. Her opinions of their intellect and abilities are archaic, and in our 21st century wisdom, readers may cringe at her descriptions. With that said, Rawlings is a product of her time. She is not filled with hatred – but rather ignorance – an important fact to remember while reading Cross Creek.

I highly recommend Cross Creek to readers of Marjorie Rawlings’s books, to those who want to learn about Florida history and to readers who enjoy books about nature.

For those of you interested in seeing Marjorie Rawlings’s Florida homestead, I would highly recommend these sites. I hope to visit this place in 2008; it’s only a few hours north of my home, and I have heard that it’s an interesting site to see.

Friends of Marjorie Rawlings's Farm

Wikipedia article ( )

I loved this book, but please be warned: it's shockingly racist. Rawlings' attitude towards her black employees - made especially clear in Chapter 16, "Black shadows" - is quite chilling at times. ( )