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Published Oct 2012
272 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A brilliant debut novel from a New York Times bestselling author about a transplanted wife from Boston who arrives in Florida in the 1960s, starts a literary salon, and shakes up the status quo.
In 1962, Jackie Hart moved to Naples, Florida, from Boston with her husband and children. Wanting something personally fulfilling to do with her time, she starts a reading club and anonymously hosts a radio show, calling herself Miss Dreamsville.
The racially segregated town falls in love with Miss Dreamsville, but doesn't know what to make of Jackie, who welcomes everyone into her book club, including a woman who did prison time for allegedly killing her husband, a man of questionable sexual preference, a young divorcee, as well as a black woman.
By the end of this novel, you'll be wiping away the tears of laugher and sadness, and you just may become a bit more hopeful that even the most hateful people can see the light of humanitarianism, if they just give themselves a chance.
"Despite dealing with some heavy subjects - race, sexuality, and the fickleness of appearances, among them - Hearth, known for her nonfiction (Having Our Say: The Delaney Sisters' First 100 Years), deftly manages a funny and charming fiction debut." - Publishers Weekly
"The characters experience/discuss/confront almost every social, political, religious, gender-sensitive and environmental issue that's relevant in the South during the early '60s, and each topic is couched in so many Southern colloquialisms and treated with such superficiality that it's hard to take any of it too seriously - which is just as well." - Kirkus
"Amy Hill Hearth's delightful first novel, Miss Dreamville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society is a rollicking, provocative tale about how reading and meeting others who are different can be the most subversive of acts." - Ruth Pennebaker, author of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough
"Amy Hill Hearth honors and humanizes people and their wonderful diversities in her debut novel, Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society. She astutely weaves pertinent, factual histories into her fictional debut novel. What a laudable book!" - Camille O. Cosby
"Segregation, feminism, gays coming out, interracial dating, it's all in there, written as it happened in small towns everywhere. And wisdom; you could learn a lot about life from reading this book. Most of all, be daring, be friends, be true to yourself. By the end, I cried and I must say, I wouldn't mind hearing more about each of the richly painted characters." - Patricia Harman author of The Midwife of Hope River, Arms Wide Open: A Midwife's Journey and The Blue Cotton Gown
"Miss Dreamsville's cast of characters includes a postmistress, a librarian, a convicted murderer, a northern transplant, a lone African-American girl, and an even lonelier gay man, among others. Set in Naples in the early 1960s, its local color and plot will surprise Florida natives and visitors alike." - Enid Shomer, author of The Twelve Rooms of the Nile
This information about Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Debut novelist Amy Hill Hearth is a former journalist and the author or coauthor of seven nonfiction books, including Having Our Say: The Delaney Sisters' First 100 Years, the New York Times bestseller-turned-Broadway play. She met her future husband, Blair, who was raised in Collier County, while she was working as a reporter in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1983. She is a graduate of the University of Tampa.
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