I thoroughly enjoy mundane details written in compelling ways. Betty MacDonald's not-quite-memoir-but-kinda was excellent in all of those ways. However, while I tend not to nitpick The Way Things Were Then, even when it comes to open and outright racism, The Egg and I flew too close to the sun. The demeaning descriptions of Native Americans including

this white woman saying it's good that their land was stolen from them

were just a little too much for me to fully enjoy this book.