I found Lawson's thoughts on Travers' work (the Mary Poppins books particularly) interesting and worth reading (especially the section on the making of the Mary Poppins film), but I didn't think she did as good a job on her life or character.

Although Lawson reports the surface of Travers' life in great detail, there's little insight into Travers' emotional life; her need for a male mentor is simplistically (and repetitively) referred to as a search for "Mr. Banks" (clearly equated with her banker father). Her adopted son, Camillus, floats in and out of the pages of the book almost randomly, with no extended examination of their often troubled relationship. I finished the book feeling as though I had acquired a few more facts about Travers, but little more understanding of her complex personality.

Also, there are odd little errors throughout (which makes me wonder how many I didn't catch): Lawson identifies Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" and "The Snow Queen" as by the Brothers Grimm (claiming that Travers preferred the Grimms' "black" tales to the "blander, saccharine whiteness of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy stories"), she calls "Bambi" a "feel-good film about childhood" and "The Three Little Pigs" a full-length movie like "Snow White", and claims that Disney began making fairy tales and children's classics into full-length movies in the 1950s -- um, no, what about "Pinocchio" and "Snow White"?