"The Mighty Queens of Freeville" by Amy Dickinson - Book Review

When advice columnist Amy Dickinson admits on page 6 that "I've never been the kind of person who has all the answers....I've always been more likely to ask for counsel than to dole it out," you know what you're in for - a chatty, cozy armchair-of-a-book that tells how this single mother raised a child and built a life with the help of family back home.

That home is tiny Freeville, just a stone's throw from Ithaca, NY where Cornell University is located.

The proximity of a world-class university notwithstanding, Dickinson's memoir The Mighty Queens of Freeville chronicles the quirky charms of small-town life; picture a microscopic version of Stars Hollow from the series The Gilmore Girls. Like that show's title characters - mother/daughter pair Lorelai and Rory - Amy and her daughter Emily are enviably close, and much of the book centers on the joys and challenges of single motherhood.

Dickinson occasionally turns a phrase with such agility that it unfolds into a full-blown pictorial spread. When she says, "Divorce runs through my family like an aggressive chromosome," you instantly visualize sisters, aunts, endless female relatives stretched out behind her, a community of women that make up the proverbial village it takes to raise a child.

Although Dickinson bounces around from London, Washington DC, and Chicago to trace the trajectory of her crumbling marriage, the rocky road of parenthood and the twists and turns of her ever-changing career, Freeville is the place she returns to whether it's to lick her wounds post-divorce or celebrate her selection as the Chicago Tribune's "next Ann Landers."

Dickinson sounds like the smart, well-read, slightly anxious, incredibly nice friend we all have in our circle of acquaintances; and her anecdotes about her life, loves, hopes, dreams, and cats - played out against the backdrop of a village where the laundromat is named Bright Day and the main street is Main Street - read like an extended 'let's catch up' conversation with a childhood friend you haven't seen in a while.

Not all of us have roots that reach so deeply into a community our family has called home for generations, but Dickinson shares a light-hearted and satisfying glimpse of what it might be like.

The Mighty Queens of Freeville
by Amy Dickinson
Hardcover, 226pp. ISBN 978-1-4013-2285-4
Hyperion / February 2009