Part One of this 260-page memoir, Ann Crowley Thorpe, with the help of her archivist mother’s storytelling, pictures, and letters, traces the often light-hearted and sometimes heart-breaking lives and adventures of generations of her Walker family from the late 1700s through World War I.

In Part Two, Ann proves the old saying, “You can take the girl out of Georgia but you can’t take Georgia out of the girl!” She tells of sailing through the Depression in Atlanta with her beloved parade of colored nurses and her Auntie Mame-like mother who divorced her father before Ann was two years old. Later on, her mother would marry three more times, giving the author the title for Part Two: My Four Fathers. The reader experiences the angst of a Southern teenager growing up as World War II approaches, and witnesses the Southern hospitality of Atlanta matrons entertaining and caring for the soldiers billeted there. We say goodbye to Ann in 1946 on the day after her wedding to one of those peripatetic soldiers who took her away from Georgia for parts unknown.