Then there is a reticent widow, a recent arrival in Naples, who goes by the name “Plain Jane” and suggests Sylvia Plath’s poetry. (Like Carson and almost every other author the club reads, Plath is an unknown to most of the members.) The club’s scariest member is the elderly, irascible Mrs. Bailey White, recently released from a long prison term for killing her husband and interested in mysteries about missing persons.

Despite its name, the club has one male member. Robbie-Lee Simpson is a clerk at the town’s Sears order center who has turned his job into a de facto decorating business. He may be Naples’ only known (at least to Dora) homosexual, but he’s beloved by its women for his discerning eye and his sweet nature. From its men, he gets less hassle than one might expect, thanks mainly to his mother, a former Tampa stripper turned hard-bitten alligator hunter after a disastrous breast-implant mishap.

But the most shocking addition to the book club is Priscilla Harmon, a young black woman who has to work around the town’s Negro curfew to attend. She comes to the first meeting in her maid’s uniform and is so reflexively deferential to white people she can barely bring herself to speak but eventually proposes a book no one else has heard of, even though it was set just a few counties away: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Their reading choices change each of the club’s members — Jackie herself is so riveted by The Feminine Mystique she reads it straight through, stopping only to pour another scotch and light another cigarette — and they’re also changed by their friendships with each other. Jackie, with her restless, determined personality, may be the center, but all of them have secrets to reveal.

How a little old book club can lead to an encounter with the Ku Klux Klan, a college scholarship for an unlikely recipient, a scandalous confrontation at the Swamp Buggy Festival and more is all part of the story that cruises along as smoothly as Jackie’s banana-yellow Buick LeSabre convertible in Miss Dreamsville.

Colette Bancroft reviewed this book for The Tampa Bay Times.