The New York Times – Emma Brockes

Julie Andrews's memoir?opens with a soppy poem she wrote about England, but what follows is a decisively unsoppy account of a typically dismal English childhood, complete with cramped lodgings and brutish relatives, which Andrews tells briskly and without self-pity?Many celebrity memoirs overegg the rotten aspects of a childhood in order to flatter the achievements that follow it, but Andrews resists this. Her approach is restrained, and the quality of her prose such that you are reminded she is already an established children's author.