A review by jbmorgan86
Florida by Lauren Groff

3.0

I saw this book on several "summer reading 2018" lists. I also read a glowing review in one of my favorite magazines, Garden & Gun. However, I must say that I was "underwhelmed" with Florida. Florida is a short story collection full of gators, snakes, the sun, storms, and sink holes. Most of the stories are about young women with distant husbands/boyfriends and young children. These women are also going through some kind of personal crisis. All of the stories are mildly disturbing: a deaf man stuck on a reptile-filled pond with no paddles, two young girls who are abandoned on an island, a woman who sees ghosts of her exes while drinking her way through a hurricane, a mother who busts her head open and slips in and out of consciousness, a young woman attempting to escape the chains of poverty, etc. While the stories are beautifully written, most of them were unsatisfying with abrupt endings.