Eighty-year-old Dora, the narrator of a story that began a half century earlier, is bonding with an unlikely set of friends, including Jackie Hart, a restless middle-aged wife and mother from Boston, who gets into all sorts of trouble when her family moves to a small, sleepy town in Collier County, Florida, circa 1962.
With humor and insight the novel chronicles the awkward North-South cultural divide as Jackie, this hapless but charming "Yankee," looks for some excitement in her life by accepting an opportunity to host a local radio show where she creates a mysterious, late-night persona, "Miss Dreamsville," and by launching a reading group—the Collier County Women's Literary Society—thus sending the conservative and racially segregated town into uproar. The only townspeople who venture to join are regarded as outsiders at best—a young gay man, a divorced woman, a poet, and a young black woman who dreams of going to college.
This brilliant fiction debut by Amy Hill Hearth, a New York Times bestselling author, brings to life unforgettable characters who found the one thing that eluded them as individuals: a place in the world. Inspired by a real person, Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society will touch the heart of anyone and everyone who has ever felt like an outsider longing to fit in.
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"The year is 1962 and Jackie Hart, wife and mother of three, has been transplanted with her family from Boston to Collier County in Florida. She does her darndest to fit in but her new neighbours don't take too kindly to Yankee interlopers. After being frozen out of existing activities, she decides to start her own and so begins the Collier County Women's Literary Society (or Salon as Jackie likes to call it). The new group is to meet at the town library and soon attracts a bevy of very likeable misfits: Jackie, of course, the unhappy housewife, the librarian whose presence is required if the group is to be allowed to use the library; a single woman called Plain Jane who writes risque articles about sex in the boardroom for magazines like Cosmo; an elderly woman just released from prison after serving a long sentence for murdering her husband; a divorcee and rescuer of injured snapping turtles; a young black woman who dreams of going to college but doubts it will ever happen; and a gay man whose mother is an ex-stripper turned alligator wrangler.
In a time and town where the KKK is seen as a group of upstanding citizens and the literary society members definitely aren't, the society is bound to attract trouble including a run-in with said KKK. In fact, Miss Dreamsville manages to touch on just about every issue confronting the '60s, albeit superficially, including premarital sex, women's liberation, gay rights, environmental issues, Civil Rights, and even the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fortunately, this short novel never takes itself too seriously. Instead, this is a fun, fast read imbued with humour, heart, and more than a little southern charm."
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Maxine (4 out of 5 stars)