To be fair I didn't really realize this was essays, I really enjoyed the first few that were longer but I was definitely done with stories by the end. The writing was great some of the stories I just didn't care for ( )

Florida has never seemed like a defined, real place to me. My early impressions of it came from my father's Pogo books, and from beautiful yet sinister storm sets in old black and white films. Then came the fight over Elián González, and hanging chads. All very interesting, but not enough to get any sort of cogent idea of the place. Pictures of elderly citizens flooding it annually in winter in their gated communities, along with real floods from hurricanes don't help.

I knew Lauren Groff's name from positive reviews on LT, so when I saw this beautiful looking book in the store, I picked it up. The glorious beast on the cover positively shimmered. The Washington Post blurb on the back cover told me that Groff "stakes her claim to being Florida's unofficial poet laureate, as Joan Didion was for California". Well, if she could write like Joan Didion, I had to read her.

There are eleven stories here, of which nine take place in Florida. While each centres around people, it is Florida that is the real protagonist. Unpredictable, menacing, there is a real sense of danger, whether in town or in the country. Feral cats, mould, rot, insects, sinkholes, torrential rain, wind, snakes, not to mention alligators: all can damage the soul as well as the body. Being alone turns to debilitating loneliness:

And now she is crying.
I'm not crying, she tells the dog, but the dog sighs deeply.
The dog needs to take a little break from her.
The dog stands and goes inside and crawls under the baby grand piano that she bought long ago from a lonely old lady, a piano that nobody plays.
A lonely old piano.
She always wanted to be the kind of person who could play the "Moonlight Sonata".
She buries her failure in this, as she buries all her failures in reading.

.
In another story, "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners", a deaf man out rowing loses his oars and drifts helplessly.

The water thickly hid its danger, but he knew what was there. There were alligators, their knobby eyes even now watching him. He'd seen one with his binoculars from his bedroom the other day that was at least fourteen feet long. He felt it somewhere nearby now. And though this was no longer prairie, there were still a few snakes, cottonmouth, copperheads, pygmies under the leaf rot at the edge of the lake. There was the water itself, superheated until it hosted flagellates that enter the nose and infect the brain, an infinity of the minuscule eating away. There was the burning sun above and the mosquitoes feeding on his blood. There was the silence. He wouldn't swim in this terrifying mess.

Abandonment is a theme in this collection. Buildings, careers, friends, partners, parents, even children, are left behind. In the final story, "Yport", Florida itself is left behind as a woman flees summer there to research a novel about Guy de Maupassant. Normandy is a complete contrast to Florida. Even though her two children are with her, loneliness still haunts her. In the end she realizes, Solitude is danger for a working mind. We need to keep around us people who think and speak.
When we are lonely for a long time, we people the void with phantoms. Although she adds de Maupassant said this in "Le Horla", perhaps this is Groff's message. In Florida, the phantoms are all too real.

As for me, Florida remains just as unknowable.

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 ( )

Florida by Lauren Groff is an excellent collection of random stories spanning across times periods in Florida. Most of these stories center around women and children.

These stories are all separate from one another, but are all equally beautiful. I found that I enjoyed some and couldn't be bothered with others. Like most anthology and short stories sets, there's going to be some you'll absolutely love! I found the first half of this book kept my attention far more than the latter. The very last story didn't feel like it fit in with the collection, but that's just my opinion. This book would have had a much higher rating if the very last story had been left out.

The one beautiful thing about this story is Lauren's writing. She has a way with her descriptive words and I found the style so enchanting. It pulls you in and keeps your attention. Even when the stories were a little too boring and not my taste, her writing kept me attached to the page.

Overall, I definitely suggest Lauren Groff's writing if you want something that is oddly beautiful.

Three out of five stars.

I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads. ( )

I loved this book so much that I think I want to reread it. Some of the stories hearken back to Groff's Arcadia (my previous favorite of her books), and others chart new territory entirely. The stories themselves are both domestic and exotic, and they are deeply rooted in the state I love. I'm so used to reading literary fiction that's very New York-centric, so it was both delightful and strange to recognize the city where I was born (Gainesville) as the setting for many of these stories. ( )