Rating: 
Summary: Category:Fiction
Review: I am an Italian-American who has visited and enjoyed Italy many times over the last five years. I read this book before I visited Sicily in November 2003. The author and I must have visited different islands. This author and many other travel writers view their subject through rose-colored glasses. The truth, the island was more congested with traffic than Tokyo. Palermo was more grafitt-ridden than Manhattan in the 1970's. A large portion of the population, especially the men, combined arrogance, laziness and stupidity in that order.
If you decide to travel to Sicily, do a guided tour like Lawrence Durrell in "Sicilian Carousel"
Rating:
Summary: Category:Fiction
Review: I am an Italian-American who has visited and enjoyed Italy many times over the last five years. I read this book before I visited Sicily in November 2003. The author and I must have visited different islands. This author and many other travel writers view their subject through rose-colored glasses. The truth, the island was more congested with traffic than Tokyo. Palermo was more grafitt-ridden than Manhattan in the 1970's. A large portion of the population, especially the men, combined arrogance, laziness and stupidity in that order.
If you decide to travel to Sicily, do a guided tour like Lawrence Durrell in "Sicilian Carousel"
Rating: 
Summary: maybe (too) romantic but very good read
Review: I am rather familiar with sicily,,,,therefore, although this book may (sometimes)verge on romantic times gone past, this is a VERY GOOD AND EASY READ. At least, i can relate easily to the passion with which the author narrates her genuine experiences in this land,,, It is also true that nowadays, within a few areas, some greed and bad decisions (called progress) have affected some areas adversely, but admitteldly, alot of effort is being made to reverse this.
A melting pot of culture, history, emotions, tradition, beautiful landscapes,,,this is Sicily. BUT this mixture MAY be a little bit of a challenge for some!
Rating: 
Summary: Touching details, wonderful color
Review: I love this book. If you read the first chapter, you
are hooked!
Wonderful little vignettes of recent life in small towns in
Sicily.
For example, we are taken into the life of a 70 year old woman whose father died when she was two and her mother died before she was 10. she raised HERSELF. The author and some friends took
this woman back to her home, now considered too isolated to live in. This story alone makes it worth buying the book.
Rating:
Summary: delicate colors, wonderful portraits
Review: I really loved this book. From the very first touching chapter until the end. Theresa really knows how to paint a picture.She gives you a wonderful view of life in Sicily, but goes to the
farthest corners to tell you about. a must read for anyone interested in Sicilia or Italia
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful insight of a land seldom seen by tourists
Review: I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of this book. The chapters read like short stories about the small towns and the people of Sicily that few tourists ever see. While thousands have captured photographs of the smoke pluming from Mt. Etna, Maggio walks in the fields and talks to the people who live in the shadow of this active volcano. She even shares a cup of coffee with the engineer of the little train that circles the mountain and relates the stories he tells. This is not a book about someone who visited a distant land, but the experiences of a woman who has lived with the people and learned their language and customs.
Rating:
Summary: A Little Overly Sentimental but Still Very Good
Review: I'm going to be taking a long holiday through all of Sicily this summer, so I've been reading a lot of books about it. I found Theresa Maggio's THE STONE BOUDOIR to be a far superior book to Francine Prose's SICILIAN ODYSSEY, though THE STONE BOUDOIR is a bit sentimental and Maggio does have a tendency to "gush." For example, she writes of buildings made of "creamy yellow sandstone, or black lava, or dense blue stones, or pink clay rocks." I didn't mind this sentimentality, though. In fact, I rather enjoyed it because one could see how very sincere Maggio is about her love for the land of her ancestors.
Maggio begins her book by telling us that she is of Sicilian heritage herself...her paternal grandparents were from Santa Margherita Belice, though they eventually emigrated to the US and never returned to Sicily. Maggio, though, does visit Santa Margherita.
Maggio's love for Sicily comes through in every line of her book and she seems to have visited the island far more times than has Prose. While Prose seemed to want to "pigeon hole" Sicily and Sicilians, Maggio doesn't make this mistake. She takes us right to the "old" Sicily. She really seems to eschew anything modern, which gives her book a sort of timeless, eternal quality that I really liked. It seemed like she was writing about the Sicily that always was and always will be. Her descriptions of the Madonie Mountains were especially breathtaking and made me want to be in Sicily that very minute.
One of the best parts of the book details Maggio's visit to the ancient village of Sperlinga, where she spent the night in a stone house, i.e., a cave (it is this cave that gave the book its title), but a very modern one. Unlike Prose, Maggio doesn't find the interior of Sicily "unfriendly." She finds it just as friendly as the coastal towns, something I've found to be true on previous visits to Sicily, myself.
The chapters in THE STONE BOUDOIR are quite episodic and read like short stories, although this is a non-fiction book and not a work of fiction. Maggio's writing is good, but, as I said earlier, she does have a tendency to be overly sentimental and lyrical about Sicily, but then, who, in their right mind, wouldn't be? Sicily is a land rich in myth, culture and natural beauty. If I have any criticism about this book at all, it's the fact that Maggio seems to want to over-simplify a very complicated land with a very complex history. That, however, is just a quibble.
Recommended to anyone who has a great love for Sicily, I think this book should be read, not as travelogue, but more as a "love letter" to the land of one's ancestors.
Rating:
Summary: Awake in Seattle
Review: I've always been interested in reading about people and how they lived - past tense. This is a book about the people that live there today, in small Sicilian towns, in our modern world. Did I say modern? So little has changed in the towns the writer visited. The Stone Boudoir is not only about a place, but about the people that live there today. I found this book to be funny and beautifully written. I was captivated by the people she met along the way and long for more!
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Summary: My name is Sicily and I'm NOT impressed
Review: Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that this book was about the Hidden Villages of the Island of Sicily and not about me, Sicily Shannon. I was really hoping to learn more about my own hidden villages.
Rating:
Summary: Evocative descriptions of life in rural Sicily
Review: In her book The Stone Boudoir, Theresa Maggio shares with the reader, descriptions of rural culture in the mountain villages and towns on the island of Sicily. Having traveled to Sicily initialy to explore the birthplace of her grandparents while in college in 1973, she returned again and again, at times living with Sicilian friends and absorbing theirs and others stories and experiences.
One of the most striking aspects of this book is to realize that this rural culture exists litttle changed over the centuries, in spite of it's proximity to modern Italian/European culture. The description of the celebration of the Feast of Saint Agatha, celebrated every year in Catania is fascinating and one of the high points in this collection of essays/stories.
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