This book has all the ingredients to push my reading buttons - Savannah, one of my all time favorite cities, hoodoo/magic, a hippie chick for the main character- I love all these details. Somehow though, I didn't love this book. I really wanted to though. This book somewhat reminded me of A Great and Terrible Beauty- secret societies, magic, popular girls bordering on mean girls. I think that Beauty had better character development and was overall done better, but both books had similar themes,

um, i wrote this, so obviously i like it!

Also see the review on my blog.For me, reading The Magnolia League was like pounding my head repeatedly on a wall with the intentions of getting smarter. It just wasn't working.Alex Lee is a sixteen year old pot-head who lived on a pot-farm with her pot-head mother and her pot-head friends. When her mother dies suddenly from a car crash, she is shipped off to her grandmother's, but not before she oh-so randomly finds and grabs her mother's stone necklace, which was oh-so randomly tossed in the p...

Why did I finish this book? I keep asking myself this. In the beginning I seriously thought of chucking it, but my interest got peaked in the middle but gosh it just didn't cut it. This book should have been a sure hit. I mean the premise is just too enticing to pass up. I love southern settings and there is the element of southern magic. There are secrets that need to be uncovered and our heroine isn't your run of the mill girl. But it still fell flat to me. I'm actually a little sad really tha...

This review was first posted at http://www.rubysreads.com. Someday, I'm going to read a book where a character that comes from California but isn't from a hippie commune. I'm just saying. Some day it's going to happen. The Magnolia League--which I keep accidentally calling The Magnolia Legacy--tells the story of Alex. Before her mother died, Alex lived on a commune in Northern California, where her mother was an herbalist and she grew dreadlocks in order to impress a boy. After her mother's dea...

The Magnolia League is about a book of hoodoos and/or voodoos. It's about a group of girls obsessed with power, youth and beauty. And Alexandria(a.k.a. Alex) is about to be a part of them. Honestly, I was actually happy when I found out that I would be reading about a book without vampires and werewolves in it. And to top it all off it concentrates on hoodoos. But after reading I felt a little disappointed in it. First of all, I hated Alex. To begin with, she was a fat girl whom everyone in her

Admittedly, I have a soft spot for southern gothic, which made me predisposed to liking The Magnolia League and judging it more favorably than it probably deserves. In many (or most) ways the novel is very cliched. The premise is a teenaged California hippy chick playing the duck out of water role when she moves to the more stuffy and "superficial" south.Despite the plot's initial triteness, I liked Alex, our main character, at least in the beginning. She was spunky and considering YA's recent "...

What happens when a vegetarian hippie girl from California finds herself living in Savannah, groomed for something called The Magnolia League?Alexandria Lee grew up with her single mother in a commune, and now at sixteen, devastated by her mother's tragic death, she has lost all of her significant connections. Her grandmother seemingly wants to provide for her, but her care comes with a price. And there are many secrets that Alex will only discover after weeks and even months have passed. Will i...

I was very surprised by this book, as I wasn't sure what to expect when I went into it. The basic story idea was interesting, and although it wasn't terribly unique, the author brought something new to it. I've read books before where the story takes place within a secret society of some sort, but the idea of mixing a group of Georgia ladies with a family that practices hoodoo was completely new for me. The author gave what was, to me, a very believable reason why these two groups would end up w...

[Saturday, December 10, 2011] After the death of her free-spirited mother, sixteen-year-old Alexandra Lee is forced to move from Northern California to Savannah, Georgia, to live with her wealthy grandmother, who expects Alex to join a long-standing debutante society, which, Alex learns, has made a pact with a legendary Hoodoo family.[Tuesday, August 21, 2012] I'm in LOVE with this book! If I didn't have a huge pile of "to-read" books I would finish it... But I must warn you all, I think the spe...

Review courtesy of Dark Faerie talesQuick & Dirty: A great paranormal twist to the life of Southern Belles and the Savannah Magnolias. Opening Sentence: You know what I hate? Sweet tea. The Review: In Savannah, Georgia, the women are polite, the young ladies are presented to society, and they all have afternoon tea. What you don’t know is that under the perfect and pristine, lies a little hoodoo. It shouldn’t matter what you do to put your best foot forward, does it, as long as you do it with th...

No. Just no. If CoFA hadn't come along strutting its stuff, The Magnolia League might quite possibly have ended up on my Absolute Worst Book of 2011 list. Trust me on this one, Sane = Staying the Hell away from this book. In all fairness, the book got off to a fairly good start. Perhaps even *gasp!* unique. Alexandria Lee, who prefers to be called Alex, has just come to live with her grandmother Dorothy, after her mother dies in a car accident. Dorothy is the head of a bunch of what Alex conside...

I adore books that take place in the South, so when I read the blurb for this one, I knew I needed to read it. If Margaret Stohl & Kami Garcia’s Beautiful Creatures had a love child with Mean Girls (the film), this would be it. A fish out of water story with a dash of Southern gothic romance, witchcraft and gool ol’ fashioned Southern elitism. It was a pretty quick read, but I really enjoyed it nonetheless. I found Alex Lee to be a bit lacking in the character department. At times I found her t

This one was a pretty quick read and the pacing of the prose makes the story go by at breakneck speed. While I love stories about "Mean Girls"-type cliques and witches, combining the two in this instance was fun, but nothing really very groundbreaking.I found Alex, much in the vein of the protagonist of "This Girl is Different" extremely annoying in her "unconventional" ways and personality. I love hippie heroines more than the next girl, but I just kept wanting to smack her up until her "transf...