Murder by Death

I started to write this one last night and had to stop because I just wasn't sure what to say.  I genuinely enjoyed this book; it was lovely, and funny and extraordinarily accurate for its place and time.

But would others enjoy it as much as I did?  I don't know.  I know a huge part of why I enjoyed it as much as I did had to do with its setting: southwest Florida in the early 60's.  I'm definitely not that old, but the Florida I knew as a child differed very little from the Florida Ms. Hill Hearth describes, although thankfully, the Klan was long absent in my time, as was segregation.  

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.

Dora at 80 resonated with me; her story-telling style reminded me of my father, a master of the art himself, and nights sitting around the dinner table listening to tales of growing up in a Florida that was mostly swamp and almost no concrete.  I was never bored listening to those stories and I was never bored with this book either.  Each of the members of the Collier County Women's Literary Society has their own societal burden to carry - none of them justified - and all of them find strength and mayhem when they come together.

The author could have perhaps built the story with more tension, but I didn't mind not really worrying about what would happen; I just had a great time going along for the ride. I'm definitely checking out the sequel.