Florida

I really wanted to like this collection of short stories based on Florida life because of the writing alone,but it was really dull and dry. Only a hand full of stories stood out, for instance,the story about the woman with her two boys in the cabin and other about a family in France. Nothing in particular was really memorable about any of the stories and that's the problem. Nothing was distinct or unique every story had the same southern melancholy vibe that quickly became tedious overtime. The narration wasn't terrible it just lacked color or vibrancy,it was kind of monotone. Overall it wss just meh

Beautiful writing, but a bit of a slog. Every story was so bleak and without humour or hope. One could say the writing quality was completely my style but the content was not. In most cases I had no sympathy for any of the characters and many of them I actively disliked. I actually cheered when I finished it because now I get to read something happier.

In “Flower Hunters”, one of the stories in this collection, an angst-ridden mother finds some solace in reading about William Bartram, an 18th century naturalist who, like her had once been “a northerner dazzled by the frenzied flora and fauna” of Florida. She takes an almost perverse pleasure in imagining her homely neighbourhood as a yet undeveloped “damp, dense tangle. An Eden of dangerous things”. The protagonist completely forgets that it’s Halloween, and, as a consequence, her two boys must make do with improvised costumes. “For the older boy, she cut eyeholes in a white sheet for an old-style ghost, though it rankled, a white boy in a white sheet, Florida still the Deep South”. That night, while the boys and their dad traipse off to a Halloween party, she stays at home, reading about Bartram, listening to the rain and worrying about the sinkhole she is pretty sure is forming and threatening to gobble up her house.

The “Florida” of the title is less of a physical, geographical setting, than a complex of feelings, ideas and associations. The images in "Flower Hunters" are quite representative of this literary place, where the genteel, civilised exterior, is constantly ambushed by the dangerous and the unexpected; where relationships are brittle and class wars are still rife; where even the nicest of persons might be monsters in disguise. Several of the tales portray natural perils which, besides being symbolic, are also quite literal. "Eyewall", a ghost-story in all but name, takes place against the backdrop of a battering hurricane. Storms are a central feature of several of the stories, panthers and alligators roam in others, whilst the Biblical association between snakes and evil is reprised in “Snake Stories”. The feeling of menace is sometimes expressed in tales which skirt the Gothic – “Dogs go Wolf” is a Florida-set (where else?) re-imagining of myths and legends of feral children.

The pull of Florida is such that even in the stories set away from the state (and from North America, even), the same feelings and fears hold sway. For the protagonist of “Salvador”, the Brazilian town is as rain-soaked as home, and equally remindful of the inadequacies of a life spent tending to a bed-ridden mother. “For the God of Love, for the Love of God” is set in France, where a Florida couple visit an old friend, now married to a Swiss baron. As relationships and fortunes collapse, the story turns into a grim comedy-of-manners which I can imagine made into a French art-house movie, perhaps a sort of darker version of Le Prénom. France is, again, the backdrop of “Yport”, which follows a mother and her two boys on a journey to the places associated with Guy du Maupassant, an author whom the mother is unenthusiastically researching. The harried mother realizes that she hates the guy – both as man and as writer – but also takes another an important lesson home with her – “of all places in the world, she belongs in Florida. How dispiriting to learn this of herself”.

To be honest, “dispiriting” is an adjective which could also fit most of the stories in the collection. There are also themes, concerns and images, which keep returning obsessively, making this an anthology to savour, rather than to read in one sitting. And yes, Florida does deserve to be “savoured”. In just a few pages, Groff can draw a character worthy of a novel, conjure a setting and a mood, surprise the reader with a flash of insight, an unexpected image. At her best, Groff can indeed give us an “Eden of dangerous things”.

Florida is one very strange physical state, but this collection of short stories of the same name, is mostly very good. The word mostly is a qualifier that seem to slip in to most every review of mine dealing with short stories. Simple fact -- not every story can shine as bright.

I struggled to get through Groff's short story collection. At first, I thought it was an essay collection. I've read a couple of Groff's personal essays, and the voice of the protagonist in the first story, "Ghosts and Empties," reminded me of her personal essays. So I started reading on somewhat shaky ground. Groff is adept at character development and uses imagery in wonderful and surprising ways. She is an exceptional writer, but I was still disappointed by this collection.

I felt hamstrung by the title--Florida. Aside from a couple of stories taking place in Florida, I didn't feel the connection of the stories to the title. I've lived in northern Florida for over 30 years now. I'm a transplant, and I've had a love-hate relationship since I moved here. I sense a bit of that with Groff, especially since she seems to focus on the negatives of Florida (hurricanes, snakes, transients), but I never felt any of the stories were really about Florida, at least not the Florida I know. Yes, it's a weird state politically and demographically, and it still has considerable wildness (although the population is quickly encroaching on that), but except for the book title and the occasional mentions of Florida, Groff could have been writing about any other coastal Southern state, or maybe France since a couple of stories take place in France. In fact, "Yport" had wonderful geographic detail that gave me a strong sense of place.

I also struggled with liking her characters enough (or finding them interesting enough) to keep reading. Few characters were sympathetic. To be honest, there were times I wanted to say, "Yankee, go home!" and I'm a Yankee.

As usual, a wonderful collection of writing by Lauren Groff, who just continues to go from strength to strength.

I enjoy Groff's writing style, with its surprising twists of language, and I think that she truly captured Florida in all of its humidity, swampy smells, and crawly lizards. I thought the collection had a nice variety of stories, too, rather than feeling like they were all variations on one theme.

In the interest of full disclosure, I listened to the audiobook edition of this collection of short stories, read by the author. Her voice turns the prose of these stories into hypnotic, lyrical poems. The stories are complex and layered. As is necessary for good short stories, there is not a wasted word. Honestly, I think these are stories which each stand alone, connected by the thread of setting, Florida. I recommend letting some time go by between reading each story in order to absorb the flavor of each. I admit that I was left with more of a feeling about the writing versus the individual story plots. The feeling? Nostalgic, sad, slightly pained with hearing so many life truths, and deeply touched by the lyrical prose.. A very good collection!

While Groff's writing was top notch, the settings and stories about Florida's snakes, and other wildlife interesting, the tone was so dark that I can't really say I loved it.

A wonderful collection of meaty short stories many based in Florida where the author lives, Another link to the stories is hurricanes and inclement weather. What is so special about these are the vivid character development and the unique thoughtful plots. The only one that breaks the mold (weather) is Yport about a woman who travels to Paris with her two young sons (away from her husband) to do research on a writing project on writer Guy de Maupassant. This is a story of self discovery. This is a great collection.

No one does misbehaving mothers and errant children like Lauren Groff. The hard, beautiful work of human badness and goodness becomes spun gold through her pen. Florida, twisted domestic relations, smart prose that is often wisely inelegant, all the best of Lauren in this collection.

A few months ago, I read Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff and didn't like it very much. In fact, I can't even remember what it was about. So I hesitated to read Florida. But since I've lived on Central Florida's Gulf Coast for nearly 25 years, I decided to read it.

This is a collection of 11 intense short stories about people, mostly women, either living in Florida or with a connection to Florida. Every bad thing about Florida is highlighted: hurricanes, mosquitoes, bugs, snakes, gators, termites, swamps, homelessness, etc. Since I am afraid of snakes, one of the stories was very creepy for me.

The female protagonists in some of the stories are not content with their role as a wife and/or mother. Throughout there is a theme of loss, grief, and loneliness. Overall, I enjoyed this book because of the Floridian atmosphere which I love. Ms. Groff's writing kept me interested even though the stories were scary because of the uncertainty that seemed to lurk everywhere!

Good but not knock-my-socks-off good, partly because the tone was so similar throughout—an explicit, existential dread that derives from being a woman, a mother, a wife, a Floridian, with guest appearances by snakes, hurricanes, and that SOB (apparently) Guy de Maupassant. The writing is strong, but I would have liked to see Groff use her powers to conjure up a little more variety within the collection, even a themed one. I will say, though, she does a damn good job writing about mother love for small boys.

One of the best of the year.

Perhaps I wasn't in the mood to read this book. I usually like short stories and their ability to tell so much in so few words. It's a real art. But in Florida, I felt like I didn't know what was going on in many of the stories. Such deeply flawed and unhappy people and their thoughts in their heads just swirling around on the pages. I felt relieved to be finished so that I didn't have to read such sadness anymore.

Better than Arcadia, not as good as Fates and Furies.

This book is short stories, in theory all having to do with Florida. Only the longest takes place in France (the narrator is from Florida), and one is in Salvador, Brazil. My two favorites were The Flower Hunters (a needy and forgetful mom struggling with her perfect best friend's "needing a break"), and Above and Below (a grad student ends up homeless after losing her funding and gaining and ex-boyfriend (and thus losing her housing) at about the same time.

Goff is very good at writing the mothers of children. Per the cover flap, she has boys herself. She can capture the fear, wonder, and love that goes into being a mom.

——
p. 162 "What a relief she has boys; this princess nonsense is a tragedy of multigenerational proportions.
Stop waiting for someone to save you, humanity can't even save itself! she says aloud to the masses of princesses seething in her brain" from "The Flower Hunters"

As always, Groff's prose shines. The characters in these stories, though, mostly make for unpleasant, self-absorbed company. I also think this may be a case where the author was not the best choice as narrator. Keep in mind, too, that I am not much of a short story fan, and the ambiguous endings and abrupt cut-offs here may be affecting my judgement. Not about the characters, though. They're mostly kinda awful.

Very Chekhovian stories with a connection to Florida.

Lauren Groff is an excellent writer with a great use of prose. Her descriptions of the settings in this collection of short stories really let's you feel Florida. Her protagonists are all women and her characters are always on the verge or in some dire situation. In many cases I had a hard time with situations the characters would put themselves in. Her one story about a young homeless woman frustrated me because she was healthy and college educated and seemed willing to work at a low level job. Yet she stayed homeless. Like many short stories, hers ended in an ambiguous way. If have never read Groff I would read "Fates and Furies" first and then try "Florida". All in all she is a good author and worth the time.

First, I didn't realize this was a collection of short stories. By the description, I thought these stories would all intersect. They don't. It's just a collection of stories, loosely based in Florida. Most of the characters are nameless, which adds to the confusion. You don't get a chance to really get to know any of them and the stories end abruptly. Nothing ties or flows; it feels like a collection of half-started stories or ideas that somehow got published.

Lauren Groff made the long list for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, but unfortunately, her newest novel, Florida, did not make the cut. This interesting novel focuses on eleven people who live and work in and around Florida. The stories are only loosely connected, but each is interesting in its own way.

I was particularly intrigued by “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners.” Groff writes, “Jude was born in a Cracker-style house at the edge of a swamp that boiled with unnamed species of retiles. Few people lived in the center of Florida then. Air-conditioning was for the rich, and the rest compensated with high ceilings, sleeping porches, attic fans. Jude’s father was a herpetologist at the university, and if snakes hadn’t slipped their way into their hot house, his father would have filled it with them anyway. Coils of rattlers sat in formaldehyde on the windowsills. Writhing knots of reptiles lived in the coops out back, where his mother had once tried to raise chickens. At an early age, Jude learned to keep a calm heart when touching fanged things. He was barely walking when his mother came into the kitchen to find a coral snake chasing its red and yellow tale around his wrist (13). When I was young, I had an interest in snakes, but my interest waned when I could find none in a brown stone row house in Philadelphia.

In “Eyewall,” an attempt to raise chickens had some odd results. Groff writes, “It began with chickens. They were Rhode Island Reds and I’d raised them from chicks. Though I called until my voice gave out, they’d huddled in the darkness under the house, a dim mass faintly pulsing. Fine, you ungrateful turds! I’d said before abandoning them to the storm. I stood in the kitchen at the one window I left unboarded and watched the hurricane’s bruise spreading in the west. I felt the chickens’ rising through the floorboards to pass through me like prayers” (64). Groff has a talent for bringing into sharp relief, the two- and four-legged, as well as those with no legs at all.

“Flower Hunters” ends on a peculiar note. The unnamed narrator wants to call her friend Meg, but she remembers Meg wanted to “take a break” from their relationship. Lauren writes, “Two weeks ago, she called Meg at eleven at night because she’d read an article about the coral reef in the Gulf of Mexico being covered with a mysterious whiteish slime that was killing them, and she knew enough to know that when a reef collapses, so do dependent populations, and when they go, the ocean goes” (167)

Snakes appear off and on, and here is another, “Snake Stories.” She writes, “It is strange to me, and alien in this place, and ambivalent northerner, to see how my Florida sons takes snakes for granted. My husband, digging out a peach tree that had died from climate change, brought into the house a shovel full of poisonous baby coral snakes, brightly enameled and writhing. Cook! Said my little boys, but I woke from frantic sleep that night, slapping at my sheets, sure the light pressure on my body was twining of many snakes that had slipped from the shovel and searched until they found my warmth” (206).

Lauren Groff is a writer who can easily describe a character in her stories as well as calmly describing dangerous reptiles. Florida is a story for readers who abhor snakes, as well as those who are fascinated by the scaly creatures. 5 stars.

--Chiron, 8/2/18

Some stories that you reread years later present as both familiar and strangely new. Lauren Groff’s stories are often like that. Even if you read one on its initial publication, or came across it republished in a “Best American Short Stories” collection, you will be struck yet again by how eerily right it feels. Even when the adjectives draw you up short and get you to rethink what could have been a tired expression. Even when stories take sudden left turns, or undercut their own narrative drive by giving away something about the protagonist years ahead, or when heavy handed nature steps in to produce fear and trembling that was mostly already present in some shade of depression or hunger. It just works.

Each of the eleven stories here have a connection to Florida. Either they are set in that state, or a character is from there though currently abroad. Often the protagonist is from away, typically a northern woman who has married into a Florida family. But nearly everyone in Florida is effectively from away. Only the alligators, snakes, and the rare panther are truly native. Events, relationships, love itself, even the land here is fluid. Indeed land periodically disappears into sink holes or encroaches on former wetlands. It’s sometimes hard to find firm ground.

The majority of the stories are astonishingly good. In particular, I would mention, “The Midnight Zone,” “For the God of Love, for the Love of God,” “Dogs Go Wolf,” and “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners.” But others, such as “Ghosts and Empties,” might be even better. I was struck by “Above and Below,” a story new to me, and also by “Salvador.” But as there were no stories I didn’t enjoy it seems almost churlish to single any out.

Here, as in her novels, Groff displays a nuanced touch with metaphor. Her adjectives sometimes just startle you. It makes her writing a distinct pleasure to read. And easy to recommend.

I would give this collection of short stories 6 stars if I could. Lauren Groff's voice is impeccable. Her characters are rich and engaging and real and her descriptions of the landscape are vivid and poetic. I kept rereading passages just to savor the flow of the words and the brilliance of her images and metaphors. Groff explores themes of fear, loneliness, courage, and love with empathy but also with unflinching honesty. Storms play a large role in her stories, each of which is either set or anchored in the swampy, humid, bug- and snake-infested palmetto and oak hummocks of central Florida. Some of the storms are near hurricanes, some are simply the drama of family life. Alternating stories center on an unnamed mother of two young sons, a cynical and almost-bitter woman who continues to try to find a sense of belonging and hope, for her beloved boys if not for herself. This thread of connectivity running through the series of stories provides an unusual and satisfying grounding for the reader.

I grew up in the part of Florida where Groff sets her characters and, while she perhaps ignores some of the more charming aspects of the area, she nonetheless captures its cultural and environmental nuances. I simply loved this collection. Absolutely recommended.

“Florida is mold, feral cats, snakes, bugs, humidity, rot, spanish moss, vines, gators, sinkholes, homelessness, tent cities, termites, mosquitos, hurricanes, lizards, panthers, "a damp and dense tangle," bleaching sun, dread and heat...”

“What had been built to seem so solid was fragile in the face of time because time is impassive, more animal than human. Time would not care if you fell out of it. It would continue on without you.”

Reading through this collection of stories, it quickly becomes clear that Groff has conflicted feelings about the Sunshine State, her current state of residence. These are dark tales, mostly set in Florida, with women or children dealing with difficult issues and trying to face down personal or natural threats.
Not every story sings, but most do and the writing is uniformly strong and well-paced. If you have not read Groff, this might be a good place to start.

This short story collection is just as well-written and vital as her novels. Lauren Groff is the queen of suburban fears, of women, mothers, who are drawn to the risks of the outside because they are stifled in their homes, with their children and husbands, and by their love. The most striking of the eleven stories take place outside the snake-ridden university town of Gainesville, in Salvador, where a woman alone almost perishes in a hurricane; and in Yport, a French town where a mother's her focus is her research on Guy DeMaupassant, who, despite her decade of research on him, turns out to be utterly repulsive. Compulsively readable, there are flashes of humor and horror, and her writing flows like Class III rapids, moderately difficult and with the potential for disaster. Not much is quotable because entire stories are deserving of big pink highlighting. I don't know another writer to offer up in comparison, she's just that singular. But if you hated Fates and Furies (or just the second half), skip this.

Quotes: "For years at a time I was good at only the things that interested me, and since all that interested me were my books and my children, the rest of life had sort of inched away. My husband had to be the one to make up for the depths of my lack."

I enjoyed the first few stories, after that I enjoyed it less and less.

I’m not a fan of short stories I only picked up this book, because I have been sick and I needed shorter stories to match my attention span. This book did the trick. It treats Florida much differently than other books about Florida. The citizens of Florida are diverse, and there is diversity in this book about a variety of Floridians all will a different point of view. Excellent writing which leaves the reader to ponder before beginning the next story in the book.

Not usually a fan of short stories. I get too invested in the characters and then they go away...makes me sad, and these stories were no different. I got very involved with each character, each story, and then hated to have them end. Groff's writing is lyrical and beautiful, but her sketches in these short stories aren't enough for me. I want more.

I've always liked Lauren Groff's novels, but not loved them, but I did love her collection of short stories, Florida. The stories here are bleak and largely unhappy, ironic for a collection largely set in the Sunshine State. In many of the stories, the protagonist is a white woman, with a few young children and a patient husband, and the action in the stories is largely quotidian; she takes walks, she feeds her children, she feels melancholic about the state of things. Really, these stories should be self-indulgent and boring. But in Groff's hands, and more specifically, in her words, the stories are so well told, the details so precisely laid out, that the stories ended up being just about perfect.

This was an excellent short story collection, there wasn't a dud in the bunch! I thoroughly enjoyed all eleven stories, each of which had ties to Florida in one way or another; whether it was a setting, a hometown, a memory, etc. Florida loomed in the background of these taut tales. From surviving a hurricane while drunk and hallucinating to overcoming a childhood surrounded by snakes and an abusive father to a mother forgetting to prepare for Halloween, these stories are expertly crafted and executed. Each story is a little dark, has some seedy elements, and some very real characters, all in all very Florida-eqsue. A wonderful collection, I would love to read more short stories by Lauren Groff. It takes extreme talent to build characters, setting and plot in a few short pages but she does it exceedingly well!