Confessions of a Southern Beauty Queen

By: Julie Hines Mabus

Narrated by: Elisabeth Ashby

In the late 1960s, Patsy Channing, a stunningly beautiful young woman, was suspended from the venerable Mississippi State College for Women for breach of conduct. The resulting scandal reached all the way to the Columbus courthouse, and the press ate it up.

But Patsy's story starts long before that, living with a preoccupied and troubled mother in Memphis, Tennessee. Music becomes her ticket out and a vehicle for the one thing she covets most—a chance to be crowned Miss America.

In Confessions of a Southern Beauty Queen, Julie Hines Mabus provides a peek into that world—a world struggling through the civil rights movement, reeling from the death of JFK, and cutting loose with the musical innovations from Memphis and Detroit. Patsy develops a close friendship with a guitarist at Stax Recording Studio, giving her firsthand exposure to the early Memphis Soul Sound.

Confessions of a Southern Beauty Queen opens and closes with the end of Patsy's time at Mississippi State College for Women on that fateful spring morning in 1968 when she entered the Columbus courthouse. Patsy's story, marked with tragedy and triumph, mirrors that of a growing and evolving South, where change never comes easy.

©2022 University Press of Mississippi (P)2023 Tantor

Just Not Good

I wanted to like this book, as I’m a Mississippi native who is roughly 4 years younger than the protagonist. It’s a weak story line, the narrator mispronounced so many places and even a plant, the characters are poorly developed and behave uncharacteristically for the era. The protagonist comes off as really smart and then far too naive to be convincing on either count.