The Mighty Queens of Freeville

A single mother's heartfelt, wry and honest memoir about raising a daughter in a hometown filled with extended family.

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.