Girl Scouts in the Ozarks by Nancy Nance

I have owned Girl Scouts in the Ozarks for three years.  I wanted to try it before selling it, but I had not been motivated enough to follow through.  Since I have had trouble enjoying most books in recent months, I decided to give the book a try. 

I first ran an online search, where I saw that Kirkus Reviews declares the book to be "a much better girl scout book than the average run."  I know better than to trust Kirkus Reviews, since the reviews tend to offer the opposite opinion of what I think about most books, but I was nevertheless swayed into trying the book.

The characters are not described at all except for one girl who is more timid and another who is adventurous.  The reader learns nothing about the girls' lives, hair color, personalities, or anything else.  Having eight girls rapidly introduced without any description makes a book hard to start reading.

Depending upon what one wants in a book, the book could be considered good to very good.  I am not the target audience, which is girls who are interested in scouting.  I found some stretches of text to be interesting while others bored me.

The reader gets a heavy dose of Ozark lore, fishing, frog-hunting, squirrel-hunting, bird-watching, folk song lyrics, cooking, dialect, and identification of flowers and trees.  This is excellent content for those who want a book about scouting and all that it entails.  I did find some of it to be interesting; however, I would rather just read about a great adventure.  The two protagonists do experience an adventure towards the end of the story when they are held captive by moonshiners.  

I dislike the illustrations.  Interestingly, I found a review shown on a page about scouting books where the illustrations are said to be "striking in their woodcut simplicity."  

While the illustrations are striking, I still don't care for them.  Like with anything, it's a matter of personal taste.  I mentally compared these illustrations to the ones from the Nancy Drew books of the 1970s.  Those are considered awful by most collectors, but I would rather see illustrations like those in a book.

The same review says that the dialect is handled skillfully.  While that may be true, I hate reading dialect in books.  I don't enjoy having to sound out the dialect to figure out what is being said.  In this book, "b'ile" means "boil."  I kept pausing each time it came up.  By halfway through the book, I was used to it and knew immediately what it meant.

I skimmed some of the dialect, and I skipped the song lyrics and some of the information about bird species and tree identification.

I found some parts of the book to be very good and other parts not very interesting.  The book contains some really good information about life in the Ozarks during the early 20th century.  I do have a generally positive opinion of this book.  The book might be very good, but for me personally, it is overall just good.