From New York Times bestselling author Amy Hill Hearth, “a rollicking, provocative” (Ruth Pennebaker, author of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough) debut novel about a transplanted wife and mother from Boston who shakes up her new home in Florida during the early 1960s.
When she and her family move from Boston to a small, sleepy town in Florida in the early 1960s, Jackie Hart has no idea she is about to turn her new home upside down. Middle-aged and restless, Jackie is determined to find some excitement in her new town by accepting an opportunity to host a local radio show where she creates a mysterious, late-night persona, “Miss Dreamsville.” She also launches a reading group—the Collier County Women’s Literary Society—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.
Evocative, moving, and 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.
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
