"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."--Publisher.

Includes discussion questions. 2018-02