Comfort from a Country Quilt: Finding New Inspiration and Strength in Old-Fashioned Values

The spunky, red-headed, platinum-selling country singer purports to offer a ""country quilt"" of a book, stitching together patches of humor, anecdote and inspiration. ""Crazy quilt"" might be a more apt description, as she juxtaposes down-home tales of tour-bus pranks and of her rodeo-riding younger days with preening portraits of her young son, Shelby, and just-hang-in-there-kid, grit-and-determination pep talks for her readers. McEntire (Reba: My Story) is at her best spinning yarns of country life, whether paying tribute to the ""modern country woman"" who can ""kick back at the country fair, then kick off her shoes and read Vanity Fair,"" or recounting her daddy's hard-scrabble childhood. At a lavishly set table in Florence, Italy, ""Daddy,"" startled to count 27 drinking glasses, explained how his family drank its water at meals when he was a child: ""you got up and went over to the bucket and picked up the dipper and got a drink out of it, just like everyone else did."" Her most valuable--and repeated--piece of advice is to find what you're best at and stick with it. She may be a great success as a singer, but she says that she has no fashion sense, having grown up in a town too small for trends. So she leaves the makeup and costumes (not to mention the finances) to experts. Being a star isn't nearly as easy as it looks, she declares. So how does one make it as a country singer, or in the rodeo, or at anything else? It comes down to one thing, says Reba: ""Work hard. When you're done with that, continue to work hard."" (May)