The Mighty Queens of Freeville - Softcover

Amy Dickinson

3.66

2,767 ratings by Goodreads

9780340962619: The Mighty Queens of Freeville

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340962615 ISBN 13: 9780340962619

Publisher: Hodder Paperback, 2010

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Amy Dickinson's advice column, 'Ask Amy', appears daily in more than 150 newspapers across the USA, read by more than 22 million readers. Her motto is 'I make the mistakes so you don't have to'.In The Mighty Queens of Freeville, Amy Dickinson takes those mistakes and spins them into a remarkable story. This is the tale of Amy and her daughter and the women in her family who helped raise them after Amy's husband abruptly left. It is a story of frequent failures and surprising successes, as Amy starts and loses careers, bumbles through blind dates and adult education classes, travels across country with her daughter and their giant tabby cat, and tries to come to terms with the family's aptitude for 'dorkitude'. Though they live in London, D.C., and Chicago, all roads lead them back to her original hometown of Freeville (pop. 458), a tiny upstate village where Amy's family has cultivated the land, tended chickens, and built houses and sheds for over 200 years. Most important though, her family has made more family there, and they all still live in a ten-house radius of each other. With kindness and razor-sharp wit, they welcome Amy and her daughter back weekend after weekend, summer after summer, offering a moving testament to the many women who have led small lives of great consequence in a tiny place.

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About the Author:

Amy Dickinson is a syndicated advice columnist. She replaced Ann Landers in 2003 and now pens the 'Ask Amy' column, which appears in 200 newspapers, including the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Boston Herald and the Washington Post. She currently lives in Chicago.

From The Washington Post:

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Amy Dickinson took over Ann Landers's syndicated advice column in 2003. In "The Mighty Queens of Freeville," she comes across very much as you'd expect an advice columnist to: smart, humorous, common-sensical, not prone to deep self-analysis and -- despite having lived in London and Chicago and worked in New York as a television producer -- a passionate proponent of small-town American values. Billed as a memoir, "The Mighty Queens" reads more like a collection of essays, something with which to pass the time while you're waiting at the airport. The book hits all the right contemporary women's-lit buttons, from the title, which immediately tells you you're in Sisters of the Traveling Pants territory, to the wry, bright writing style, to the cast of characters in Dickinson's family. They may suffer from an unusually high divorce rate, but they're terrific at sharing communal pancake breakfasts and being there for each other. No one is described in much detail. Daughter Emily, no doubt well on her way to Mighty Queenhood herself, doesn't get a lot of ink. Nor does the affluent, spoiled husband whom Dickinson followed to London and eventually divorced, though you can't help finding him rather interesting. The narrative skims lightly over a lot that you'd like to hear more about: Dickinson's childhood "on a failed dairy farm in rural poverty of the ugly, muddy sort," for example. And the beloved cow, Shirley, who ended up in pieces in the freezer. There's probably a very good story somewhere beneath the swift, chatty surface of Dickinson's prose, and perhaps someday she'll tell it. -- Juliet Wittman
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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