📚 A new bookish adventure is heading your way — follow the tour, meet the reviewers, and don't miss a single stop along the way! 🐾
We are on tour from 16th November – 22nd November
💕📚✨ Let's fall in love with a great story together. ✨📚💕
Book Details
About the Book
Filmmaker Amanda Caminetti sits in the audience at the Academy Awards, nominated for Best Environmental Documentary. Margo Robbie and Josh Groban are about to announce the winner, while Amanda thinks back to the new millennium when her career began its journey from clueless high school student to the adventurous woman she's become.
When 17-year-old Amanda, a big daydreamer, explodes the microwave for the third time, her parents dole out an edict to make her focus: Drive the family dogs, Bridget and Lucky every day for a half hour, pull over and write about an interesting house, person, whatever on her route and give a detailed family report weekly.
She's mortified. But then 80-year-old Bernice, who she helps during her rides, starts changing her life. During visits, Amanda learns Bernice worked for the Roosevelt family at Meadow Croft, flew planes for Jackie Cochran during World War II and still flies a Piper Cub. A digital/video gift from Amanda's successful author Aunt Debbie, comes just in time to film, with help from her friend Alicia, a local dirtbag in the act of popping off baby Canada geese. They race to the local newspaper editor with their story ultimately becoming heroes.
Tasked with reading Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood by Cari Beauchamp as inspiration, Amanda's hilarious daydreams morph into supportive visits by Frances and her actress friend Mary Pickford, along with a feisty noblewoman from the year 1000, as she films Bernice and begins environmental videos.
This hilarious, poignant story, in each woman's voice, includes magical realism and raises the bar on trusting wise older friends and family and finding confidence to develop your passion.
Have you met Linda Leuzzi…
Linda Leuzzi is an award-winning journalist, editor and author of 8 non-fiction books for young adults, two of which garnered New York Public Library citations. She interned with Newsday early in her career, freelanced for them for several years, then became a reporter and then editor for three community newspapers. Stories for the Long Island Advance, Suffolk County News, Islip Bulletin, and Fire Island & Great South Bay News have won 21 New York Press Association Awards including First Place mentions for In-Depth Reporting, Spot News, Coverage of the Arts, Spot News Photo, and Coverage of Local Government.
She’s won two Third Place Sharon Fullmer Awards for Community Leadership for team coverage of LGBTQ+ issues.
In 2025, besides her Coverage of Local Government Award, she also won a 2nd Place Best Personality Profile. Her many celebrity interviews have included Isabella Rossellini, Chazz Palminteri, Bernadette Peters, Sara Jean Ford, Melissa Errico, choreographer Randy Skinner as well as Nobel Prize and MacArthur Award scientists. Community awards include Woman of Diversity for the Of Colors Black History celebration, Brookhaven Town’s Outstanding Service in Media/Communications and a Patchogue Theatre for the Performing Arts honor for her stories. Also, Linda is a proud non-profit Rollstone Foundation honoree with her
husband for their efforts. After stepping aside as editor for the Long Island Advance, Linda subs when needed and is a weekly Contributing Writer and now also contributes to the Fire Island News. She is a Bellport Rotarian and hosted seven Rotary exchange students with her husband. A lover of PBS British series, foreign films, Turner Classic Movies, Broadway and Gateway musicals and Patchogue Theatre concerts, as well as European travel to Paris, London, Prague and other gorgeous places, Linda has a St. John’s University journalism degree and is always thinking of stories walking with her rescue dog Tina.
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Tour Schedule
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Thank you for taking part in this Zooloo's Book Tour.
