Book Review: Florida by Lauren Groff

Florida

Author: Lauren Groff

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Date of Publication: June 5, 2018

Pages: 288 (Hardcover Edition)

    This is the second collection of short stories for this author (she published Delicate Edible Birds in 2009).  She also has published three novels.  This outstanding collection was published in 2018 and won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award, Kirkus Prized and Southern Book Prize.  The author now lives in Gainesville and Florida paints a vivid and somewhat unflattering picture of her home state.  This is a "warts and all" view of the Sunshine State.

     There are eleven gripping stories here, all dealing with aspects of contemporary life.  There are treatments of homelessness, caring for aging parents, strained marriages, work-life imbalance and single parenting.  There is also an undercurrent in several stories of overpopulation and encroachment of development on natural territories   All of the stories are told with an economy of words but with striking description.

In Ghosts and Empties a young mother walks nightly in her new neighborhood after putting her children to bed:  "On my nighttime walks, the neighbors' lives reveal themselves, the lit windows domestic aquariums."

In "Flower Hunters" a woman on vacation in a remote cabin with two small children (while her husband is at home working) endures a violent summer storm: "The rain knocks at the metal roof, and she imagines it licking away at the limestone under her house, the way her children lick away at Everlasting Gobstoppers, which they are not allowed, but which she still somehow finds in sticky rainbow pools in their sock drawers."

In "Yport" the author describes the climate in her home state: "Florida in the summer is a slow hot drowning."  Later, the main character who is doing research on a book about Guy de Maupassant describes the town of Yport, France : "Look!  she tells them, gesturing up the harbor at a little cluster of nineteenth-century houses on the other side of the channel, which huddle together, distrustful of the twenty-first century industry around them."

   In summary, this is an outstanding collection of stories, exquisitely written with evocative descriptions.  Florida features many contemporary social issues woven into the fabric of entertaining and gripping stories.