Review: The Mighty Queens of Freeville, Amy Dickinson

The women in Amy’s family always end up raising their children alone.  Almost without exception, the men leave.  Thus Amy finds herself in a family full of women, yet still hopeful that her marriage will be better than all the rest.  She moves to London with her journalist husband and they have a child together.  Amy misses him, but thinks everything is okay until he leaves her and she discovers that he has a girlfriend.  Amy flees to the bosom of her all-female family and sets about getting her life back together.

I thought it was really sad that their marriage didn’t work out and that they used their family histories as an excuse.  To me it seems fairly obvious that a job like his would be a strain on any family, especially a couple that wasn’t used to dealing with it.  With Amy all on her own as a single mother in a foreign country with a single friend, what were they expecting?  I also expected this to be a bit more about Amy’s family, and while they were on the fringes of the story, they were certainly secondary to Amy’s main struggle to figure out how to be a single mother.  She and her daughter have a wonderful relationship and it’s nice to see a teenage daughter not hating her mother for once (although tantrums come with the territory).  Amy’s rise to fame as the new “Ann Landers” is anything but ordinary, but this is still a sweet story of a mother’s attempt to come to terms with her life, get on her own two feet, and alternately help and be supported by her family.  Oh, and I loved the ending, very cutely done and its brevity was appreciated.

Overall, recommended if you like memoirs or heart-warming stories about families.  I’d put this as a solid “good”.  You’re not going to regret reading it, but it isn’t going to be your favorite book ever.

Buy The Mighty Queens of Freeville on Amazon.