Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society: A Novel
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.

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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Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society: A Novel
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.

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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Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society: A Novel

Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society: A Novel

by Amy Hill Hearth
Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society: A Novel

Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society: A Novel

by Amy Hill Hearth

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Overview

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.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781451675238
Publisher: Atria Books
Publication date: 10/02/2012
Edition description: Original
Pages: 272
Product dimensions: 5.42(w) x 8.04(h) x 0.73(d)

About the Author

Amy Hill Hearth is the author of Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women’s Literary Society and Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County, in addition to author or coauthor of seven nonfiction books, including Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years, the New York Times bestseller-turned-Broadway-play. Hearth, a former writer for The New York Times, began her career as a reporter at a small daily newspaper in Florida, where she met her future husband, Blair (a Collier County native). She is a graduate of the University of Tampa.

Read an Excerpt

Miss Dreamsville
One

My name is Dora Witherspoon but most folks know me as the Turtle Lady. A long time ago, I rescued a snapping turtle the size of a truck tire from the middle of Highway 41, a move deemed so foolish it became local legend. I can’t say I’m partial to it, but here in the South, nicknames stick like bottomland mud.

I’d like to tell you a story from my younger days. I’ve been a storyteller my whole life, but I wasn’t ready to tell this one until now. It happened fifty years ago—in 1962. Parts of it are hard for me to share, but the fact is that I’m old now—eighty years of age, if you must know—and probably running out of time. I want young’uns to know about my time and place, the people I knew, and a world that’s all but gone. I want them to know that one person can come along and change your life, and that being a misfit, as I was, doesn’t mean you won’t find friends and your place in the world.

HER NAME WAS JACKIE HART, and the first time I set eyes on her was across the counter at the post office. She’d moved to Collier County with her husband and kids from, of all places, Boston. Before we knew it, she turned things upside down faster than you can say “Yankee carpetbagger.”

From the get-go, Jackie was a troublemaker in the eyes of the town fathers, but to the few of us who gave her a chance, her arrival in town was a godsend. She started a little reading group, bringing together the most unlikely people in town, including me. We were all outcasts, but as a group we became strong.

None of us saw these changes coming, though. Jackie was like a late-afternoon storm on the Gulf, the kind that comes from nowhere and sends even the old-time fishermen hurrying to shore. She was a surprise, that’s for sure.

I’d been working at the post office for about a year, since my divorce, and there were days—like the one when I met Jackie—that were so slow, I swear I could’ve watched my fingernails grow if I’d had a mind to. By two o’clock there wasn’t a thing to do but watch the horseflies dodge the slats of the ceiling fan. I wasn’t supposed to, but I started reading magazines that hadn’t been sorted yet. First I studied Mr. Freeland’s copy of Time magazine. But then I couldn’t resist peeking at Vogue. No one got Vogue. Whoever the person was—a Mrs. J. Hart—was new in town. The rest of the Hart family didn’t get much mail, but I had already noticed that Mrs. J. Hart got all kinds of stuff that had probably never—until now—passed through the sorting station up at Fort Myers. The New Yorker. National Geographic (generally frowned upon since it might include pictures of naked African people). And, of course, Vogue.

I kept returning to Vogue. I’m not sure I’d ever seen a copy. I was studying the clothes and models and perfume ads, and breaking post office regulation number 3651 (reading a customer’s periodical), when I heard a polite little cough and looked up. And there was Jackie.

She was wearing an enormous straw hat and a pair of sunglasses that made her look like she’d just left a party hosted by Sophia Loren on the French Riviera. Her skin was very white, as if she’d never encountered a single ray of sun, and her hair, peeking out from under her hat, was what my mama would have called “the barn’s on fire” red. Add to it the way she carried herself and the result was something we rarely saw in Collier County—glamour.

No doubt about it, she was the most interesting person to show up at my postal counter since Mrs. Bailey White was finally let out of jail and moved back home the year before. While the peculiar Mrs. Bailey White was a curiosity, the stunning woman now standing before me was something else entirely. You could be sure she’d never been called mousy, a word I often thought of in connection with myself. I felt like a hick in my humble seersucker dress with the self-tie belt, and was glad she couldn’t see my penny loafers. She had what Mama called an hourglass figure, which made my flat little chest and rear end seem positively boyish in comparison.

“Oh, is that the new copy of Vogue?” she asked, with an innocence that might have been phony but I wasn’t sure. She spun the magazine around and examined the cover.

“Hm,” she said. “I do believe this is my copy.”

I would have died of shame except I wanted to see what she would do next. Yet all she did was stand absolutely still, waiting for me to answer.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and my voice came out kind of hushed. “I’m very sorry. I admit I was violating post office regulations. Please,” I added, “don’t tell my boss or I could lose my job.”

She took off her sunglasses and looked at me, eyeball to eyeball. Her eyes were large and round and skillfully made up. “I would never do that,” she said, adding, “but in the future, could I read my magazine first, please? And then you can borrow it when I’m done? Would that be all right?” Everything came out as a question.

I was pretty sure—but not 100 percent—that she wasn’t being sarcastic. I pulled together the rest of her mail and gave it to her. She walked to the door, then stopped. Looking back at me, she asked, “What else do you like to read?”

I couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d asked for directions to the nearest pool hall. “Well, um, sometimes I read Life magazine,” I said. “And Ladies’ Home Journal.”

“Do you like novels?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I haven’t read too many.”

“Well, once I am settled, I am thinking of asking the library to start a women’s reading group. I was thinking we could call it the Collier County Women’s Literary Society. Would you like to be part of it?”

“Well . . . okay.” I was not really sure I meant it, although a part of me was deeply flattered.

“What, may I ask, is your name?”

“Dora,” I said. “Dora Witherspoon.”

Less than a month later, I started seeing flyers around town announcing the first meeting. “A women’s literary society—what the hell is that?” my boss, Marty, muttered. Jackie had posted a flyer on the post office bulletin board, next to the Collier County mosquito spraying schedule and the pulled pork fund-raiser that the Masons made everyone suffer through every year.

“It’s just people who like to read books,” I said.

“You mean like the Bible?”

“I don’t know. Maybe cookbooks. Maybe a few novels.”

“Novels?” Marty raised an eyebrow.

“Well, how much trouble can we get in, reading books at the library?” I said, a little irritated. “As a matter of fact, I may go myself.” Marty could be condescending, and he was convinced everything was a plot hatched by Communists.

“Oh, I guess you’re right,” he said finally.

Now I felt like I had to go. Besides, maybe I would learn something new. I wasn’t what you’d call worldly. In fact, I’d never been out of Florida. But I’d had two years at the junior college in Saint Petersburg, and while it was just a hundred and twenty miles up the Gulf, the experience had been an eye-opener. One of my professors was from Nevada. Another, from New Orleans. My fellow lodgers at the rooming house where I lived were women who had either retired to Saint Petersburg or (in the case of one lady, whose story I never learned) seemed to be running away from something up north. From them I learned about places like Ohio and Pennsylvania. There was one lady, a Mrs. Jamesway, who had a subscription to a big-city newspaper called the Toledo Blade. Even though it arrived in the mail three or four days after it was published, it was still fun to read.

After I finished junior college, I married Darryl and moved to Ocala. That’s horse country, in north-central Florida. Like me, Darryl was from Collier County—I’d known him my whole life. But while I was at school, he started a small construction company and somehow got a job building a gorgeous new estate near Ocala for some rich folks from Kentucky. The barns Darryl built were nicer than any house I’d ever been in. The owners—a man and his wife in their fifties—talked about impossibly wonderful places they traveled to often, like London, New York, and San Francisco.

Any dreams I had for the future ended with my divorce. My parents were dead, I’m an only child, and I was inching up on my thirtieth birthday. I had nowhere else to go except the little cottage in Naples that had been in my father’s family for three generations and was spitting distance from the Gulf. I needed a job, but the only person who would hire me was my cousin Marty, who ran the post office. Everyone else treated me like I had mange.

I didn’t have high hopes when I went to the first meeting of the Collier County Women’s Literary Society. To my surprise, seven people showed up, which was five more than I expected. We sat on folding chairs in a little circle—Jackie, me, Miss Lansbury (the librarian), Mrs. Bailey White (the old lady who had returned from jail the previous year and was always called by her entire name as a sign of respect for her age), a young colored girl wearing a formal maid’s uniform, a woman in her fifties who wrote poetry and said her name was Plain Jane, and the town’s one and only Sears employee, Robbie-Lee Simpson, Collier County’s only obvious homosexual.

Miss Lansbury spoke first. “Welcome!” she said in her brisk, pleasant librarian voice. She wore a sleeveless sheath in pale green with a floral-patterned scarf that was perfectly matched. I tried to guess her age and concluded she was probably about thirty-five. She was still considered new in town—having lived here only ten years or so—and suspiciously single. However, seeing as she was a librarian, people let it go. After all, she was that rare bird—a career girl—and destined to be an old maid, a problem of her own making. She had beautiful black hair thanks to her Spanish ancestors. “Mrs. Jacqueline Hart”—she gestured politely toward Jackie—“who just moved to town from Boston, has spearheaded this new group. Mrs. Hart, would you like to tell us a little more about yourself?”

Jackie looked surprised but rose to the occasion. “Well, my family moved here exactly one month ago. My husband, Ted, is the new business manager for the Toomb family. We have three children—twin girls who are fourteen and a son who is twelve.”

She didn’t have to explain who the Toomb family was. They were one of the most powerful families in South Florida, though a rung or two down from the Colliers. Everyone had heard that old Mr. Toomb, who wanted a better grasp of how things worked in the North, had gone out and hired a business manager from Boston. The man he hired was Ted Hart, a World War Two Army veteran who had put himself through college on the GI Bill.

“Oh,” Jackie added, “and please call me Jackie.”

“You mean like the Jackie in the White House?” Mrs. Bailey White asked lightly.

“Well, not quite like her, no,” Jackie said and smiled. “I have a northern accent, that’s true. But I’m not skinny and I couldn’t hope to be as elegant as that Jackie.”

But the comparison, in one way, was striking. I couldn’t imagine Jackie Kennedy or Jackie Hart adapting very easily to life in our little town. People think of Naples as one of the richest, swankiest places on earth, but back in 1962 it was a sunbaked southern backwater no bigger than a cow pie. There were maybe eight hundred people living here, a number that grew to a whopping twelve hundred or so in the winter when the Yankees would come down to fish for sea bass and snook. Naples was a redneck town and proud of it.

I have to admit that moving here was a pretty raw deal. I say that even though I’m from Collier County and have at least a smidgen of pride. But relocating here must have been especially shocking to Jackie. She was, clearly, a “Boston girl” through and through. Cultured. Progressive. All that Yankee stuff we Southerners find so irritating.

No one knew what to say next, so Miss Lansbury jumped in again. “Well, I must say I am delighted. Thrilled. I think the rest of us know who each other are, right? Oh, one more thing: Robbie-Lee, this is supposed to be a women’s literary society, so you shouldn’t really be here. But if everyone is okay with it, I suppose it’s all right. Does anyone have any objections?”

No one did, so Robbie-Lee stayed.

I was actually more surprised that the Negro girl had come. You never saw colored folk at the town library. Her being there was bold, even reckless. Then again, what would we have done to her? Given her the evil eye until she left? Made a fuss and told her to leave? None of the rest of us sitting around our little circle seemed to be looking daggers in her direction. Maybe the Collier County Women’s Literary Society would be that rarest of organizations—an integrated one.

I suppose it’s still basically true, but in those days, white people tended to fall into three categories. There were those who went out of their way to harm or hold back Negroes in any way they could. Then there were those who never gave Negroes much thought and really didn’t care. And then there was a small group of white folks who felt badly about the cruel way Negroes were treated and wanted to see things improve.

I was raised to be in the last category. My father, who I don’t remember well, was said to be a regular old redneck. But Mama was a nurse, and during her training someone had drilled into her head that all people were human and should be treated accordingly. She worked for the only doctor in town, and sometimes, when she was needed at the four-bed hospital, she would treat colored folks who came to the back door. But she didn’t advertise that she did this and told me to keep quiet too. Strange to think you could get hurt because you’d been helping someone.

Mostly, though, I’d had little interaction with Negroes. We lived in different parts of town and belonged to different churches. The Supreme Court of the USA had famously decided, back in the fifties, that schools were supposed to be integrated, but here in Collier County they apparently hadn’t gotten the message. The white kids were still picked up by a shiny yellow school bus and taken to their well-kept schools—grammar, junior high, and a new high school north of town. The colored kids were picked up by a bus that predated World War Two and looked like it had survived (more or less) Hurricane Donna. The so-called colored bus went in the opposite direction, to a single school—first through twelfth grades. I had never been there—I don’t think any white person ever had—but I heard the place was a shambles.

Now, if my family had been rich, we would have had colored servants, but Mama, being a widowed nurse with little money to spare, did her own cooking, cleaning, and ironing. Same with everyone else in our part of town. We’d see Negroes now and then, but they didn’t talk to you and you didn’t talk to them. I thought they were the unfriendliest people on earth. Only when I was older did I realize they were avoiding us to stay alive.

As we sat around the little circle with Miss Lansbury as our leader, I tried not to stare at the colored girl. I wondered what she would do about the curfew (eight p.m. in the summer, six p.m. in the winter, when nightfall came earlier), which applied only to Negroes. But she herself brought up the topic. “My name is Priscilla Harmon and I would like to be part of this group.” She had taken off her maid’s cap and perched a pair of horn-rimmed glasses on her nose. She looked like an entirely different person. “I love to read,” she added. We all nodded and smiled. Encouraged, she said, “I would like to go to college, maybe Bethune-Cookman.”

“Oh, that’s marvelous!” Jackie said. “What would you like to study?”

“Well, I would . . . I would like to be a teacher. Maybe an English teacher.”

I tried to hide my astonishment. I wondered how realistic this was. I knew the answer—not very.

“My only problem,” Priscilla was saying, “is that if you all are kind enough to let me belong to the group, I will need a ride home—you know, on account of the curfew.” She ended with a sweet, hopeful smile that revealed the most beautiful teeth I ever saw. They were the same color as the starched white collar that framed her face.

“Well, of course we’ll take you home, dear,” Jackie said. “It’s not a—”

“You may have to take me home too,” Robbie-Lee interrupted. “I don’t stay out after dark either.” This was a stunning admission, and the closest Robbie-Lee had ever been (as far as I knew) to acknowledging his homosexuality.

“Well, someone may have to take me home too!” We all turned and looked at the petite Mrs. Bailey White. She had a loud, authoritative voice when she needed to.

“Oh, why is that, Mrs. Bailey White?” Miss Lansbury asked. “Are you not driving anymore?”

“I’m not allowed to have a driver’s license. That’s part of my parole deal.”

This was quite a conversation stopper, and the rest of us fidgeted in our hard metal chairs until Miss Lansbury—thank the Lord—took the lead again.

“Well, I am sure we can take care of these transportation issues,” she said, emphasizing the last two words. Miss Lansbury had a way of making every little thing sound important. Maybe that’s something they teach at librarian school.

“May I speak for a moment?” Jackie asked, raising her hand like a schoolgirl. “I want to explain that what I have in mind is a salon.”

“You mean like a beauty parlor?” Robbie-Lee asked.

“No, dear, not that kind of salon,” Jackie said. “There was a time when a salon meant a gathering of people who discussed the issues of the day. They would meet in the parlor of someone’s huge, oversized house and discuss literature, art, politics.”

“I have a huge, oversized house,” said Mrs. Bailey White. It wasn’t really an invitation but more like a statement of fact. Still, even the suggestion of meeting at her place gave me the creepy-crawlies, since she had gone to prison for murdering her husband in that very house. I wasn’t sure if Jackie knew of Mrs. Bailey White’s checkered past, but she must have picked up on the uneasiness that swept through the rest of us like a rogue wind off the Gulf.

“Well, that’s very nice,” Jackie said politely. “Perhaps someday you will be kind enough to have us over.”

“But does this mean we’re not going to read books?” asked Robbie-Lee, still a little confused.

“Yes, we will read books,” Jackie replied patiently. “We will be centered around books. But I am suggesting we choose books that make us think and expand our horizons. If we read a book about music, we might invite a musician to perform as part of our book discussion. The idea is to read books that stimulate our minds and challenge us to think about the issues of the day.”

We responded so enthusiastically that we sounded like an amen chorus.

“But if you’ll permit me to say so,” Jackie continued, “I am thinking we really must meet here, at the library, as a way of letting the community know that everyone is welcome. This is not a private club.”

These words were met with a second round of approval. I felt punch-drunk (not that I’ve ever actually been punch-drunk in my life, on account of a promise I made to Mama). Private clubs, official and otherwise, were pretty typical in our little town. I looked from face to face around the circle. None of us was Junior League material; none of us had big money; Mrs. Bailey White was an ex-con. If you were colored, homosexual, a divorced postal worker (me), or—God forbid—a sexy redhead with a Boston accent newly arrived in town, you were on your own. But Jackie was suggesting that we form our own group. And meeting at the library would give us cover.

A place to belong? Here in Naples? Just the possibility made me giddy as a jaybird. I began feeling something in my heart that I thought was long gone and buried. I’m not 100 percent sure, but it might have been hope.

Reading Group Guide

This reading group guide for Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.


Introduction

When Boston-bred Jackie Hart sweeps into sleepy Collier County like a late-afternoon storm on the Gulf, young divorcee Dora has a feeling her life is about to change. Jackie immediately forms the Collier County Women’s Literary Society, and, for the first time in her life, Dora feels she has found her place in the world. The 1960s is a time of shifting perspectives and dramatic change, and as these changes creep slowly into Collier County, Mark, Dora and her small group of misfit friends band together—helping each other hold onto their dreams and struggle through the complexities and hardships of everyday life united.

Topics & Questions for Discussion

1. Discuss the various forms of prejudice that each character is subjected to throughout the novel. Consider not only the racism that exists in Collier County, but also the less overt discrimination—like the doctors’ attitude toward Robbie-Lee’s mother’s chest pain, or the way Dora is treated for being divorced. Do you think such attitudes are inherent or taught?

2. H ow much of a person’s character is shaped by the times in which they live? Was it difficult for you to imagine a time when segregation was so prevalent? When even someone as good-natured as Dora would try not to stare at “the colored girl?” (page 12)

3. What was your reaction when Jane reveals to Jackie that she completely fabricates her sex advice columns? Did you find it ironic that she “sounded annoyed” when Jackie asked her if she had actually done what was written in the column? (page 53) How easy do you think is it to ignore the possible consequences of our actions when we are separated from actually having to see the results—by distance, or otherwise?

4. Dora says about Jackie, “She was, clearly, a ‘Boston Girl’ through and through. Cultured. Progressive. All that Yankee stuff we Southerners find so irritating.” (page 10) Later Jackie says, “What a mean little redneck town this is. I had no idea it would be so . . . Southern.” (page 205) How did you react to this hidden conflict between North and South? Do you think this sentiment still exists today? What did the rest of the literary society learn from Jackie and her Northern family (and vice versa) that changed these attitudes over the course of the novel?

5. Some authors (e.g., Mark Twain) intentionally use colorful storytellers who are to be believed more because of the underlying truth embedded in the story than adherence to rigid standards of objective reporting. Dora, a self-described storyteller, seems to belong in this time-honored category. Do you think she is telling the truth as she knows it? Can a storyteller be an objective narrator? Can anyone truly be an objective narrator?

6. What makes Jackie the ideal friend to each member of the Literary Society? What common ground do they share? Do you have someone who has been a similar presence in your life?

7. Were there any historical facts about life in Florida during the 1960s that surprised you? In what ways does fiction provide a means for a fuller understanding of a nonfiction truth?

8. Why do you think Jackie was the only one who had such a strong response to The Feminine Mystique? Do you think their points still hold true?

9. Discuss the members’ reactions to Their Eyes Were Watching God. What did you think of their conversation? Was anyone’s opinion unexpected? Do you think their conversation was worlds apart from the discussion that would take place today when reading the same book?

10. Many characters in the book have an alter ego of sorts: Dora is the Turtle Lady, Jackie is Miss Dreamsville, Jane is Jocelyn Winston, and even Miss Lansbury is an Osceola Indian who has been “passing for white.” (page 248) What do these alter egos express about each character’s personality?

11. The town is shocked and angry when they discover Jackie is Miss Dreamsville. Do you think their reaction was warranted? What does it say about the disconnect between fantasy and reality? Do you think there was a real person who could’ve satisfied the various visions of Miss Dreamsville? Or would people have been disappointed no matter what?

12. Jackie says, “Maybe freedom means defining yourself any way you want to be.” (page 145) Do you agree? How do you feel about Jane’s reaction that “we are a long way from that happening”? Do you think the society members end up defining themselves how they want to be, and thus finding their freedom? Whose life do you think was changed the most by being a part of the society?

13. Dora reflects, “How hard it must be to keep fighting for your dream when that dream is probably a mirage.” (page 199) What do you think is the difference between a dream and a mirage? Discuss the role dreams play throughout the novel. Were you surprised to discover Priscilla was pregnant when she seemed to have the most focused dream of going to college and becoming an English teacher?

14. After everything that’s happened to them, Dora thinks, “. . . now I could see the genius in allowing the future to evolve. You could create momentum. You could launch something and see where it goes. You couldn’t line everything up, like so many dominoes, and make everything fall into place.” (page 250) Do you agree or disagree with her? What was your reaction to the ending? Did the protagonists follow the paths you thought they would take?

15. What differences (or similarities!) did you note between the literary society in the novel and your own book club?

Enhance Your Book Club

1. Visit Amy Hill Hearth’s website at www.amyhillhearth. com to learn more about the author and to read her essay “Why I Write.”

2. Each character in Miss Dreamsville is searching for a purpose to keep them going or a dream to follow. Bring something to your book club that represents a personal passion and turn the meeting into show-and-tell. you agree with Priscilla that the issues explored in the book weren’t about women universally? What about Robbie’s feeling that men were equally limited in their choices? Do you think their points still hold true?

3. Pick one of the books that the Collier County Literary Society reads, such as Silent Spring, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Feminine Mystique, or Little Women to read and discuss at your next book club meeting. How does your discussion compare to the Collier County Women’s Literary Society’s discussion?

4. If you were to have your own radio personality name what would it be? Go around the group and share your imagined on-air pseudonym!

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