Lauren Groff is a gifted writer — Fates and Furies enthralled me! — but my eyes hurt from rolling them so hard at this book. The main problem? The narrators are SO ANNOYING, and they're all the same! A 30-something woman with two young sons and a decent (if distant) husband, who fancies herself a sexy misfit because she never fits in with those other moms — the ones who remember to bring cupcakes to class, let their children play princesses, and don’t at least partially resent their role as moth...

A collection of eleven short stories set mostly in the titular state, Florida examines the inner lives of young women and mothers afflicted by malaise, alcoholism, and, occasionally, despair. Abusive men, neglected children, unbearable storms, and the southern wilderness recur throughout the collection; the pieces gathered here feel like variations on the same set of themes. Groff writes lush sentences, full of palpable and unsettling images, and her stories move at a measured pace. Sometimes th...

I’ve never visited Florida, but I do live in a similar climate so this setting, while foreign, felt more familiar than exotic to me. The heat and humidity, lush foliage, abundant wildlife mainly of the pointy-toothed kind, houses built on stumps with ceiling fans and sleepouts in concession to the weather – all are recognisable and skilfully evoked here. Groff’s prose style is impeccable, yet it seems so effortless.Several of the stories in Florida toy with the creeping fear that arises when...

The truth might be moral, but it isn't always right. Snakes, gators, swamps and storms form the backdrop of these exquisitely human stories.I have to say I enjoyed Florida so much more than Fates and Furies. Groff's writing style is dense and wordy, metaphorical and poetic and - sometimes - exhausting. Reading her full-length novel was a chore, but for me at least, Groff seems born to write short stories. Small, hard-hitting snippets of lives that still make you feel emotionally-drained, but

fulfilling my 2020 goal to read (at least) one book each month that was given to me as a present that i haven't yet gotten around to reading because i am an ungrateful dick.review to come!

This powerhouse of a book, a collection of short stories to cause your socks to shoot from your feet. I generally prefer novels, I have trouble settling into short stories. They're over all too soon, and they still feel unfinished. But not this time. The stories pull you in immediately, and when they've lived out their astonishing, twisty, unpredictable paths, you've gotten everything there is, you don't need a single sentence more. What a writer!The stories are either set in Florida or have Flo...

If these stories are anything to go by Lauren Groff is almost comprehensively disillusioned with men. Men in these stories are either absent, inept, in another world or downright threatening. The last story - and by far the least successful - goes the whole hog and deploys Guy de Mauspassant to paint a thoroughly irksome and depressing portrait of masculinity. As a Brit one tends to forget how many deadly creatures there are in the US. The most scary threat we face from the natural world here is...

The first line in “Florida”, never left me.....“I have somehow become a woman who yells”. The entire first story was one of my favorites from the collection. Personally...I’ve played with manatees- taken walks in the scorching heat, spent beach days with our dogs, witnessed thousands of dead smelly fish along the coastline, and survived the panic of my daughter caught in the middle of a nasty hurricane. Florida, flat as a pancake, with hurricanes- alligators- and snakes - sticky hot, I miss the

‘’It is terribly true, even if the truth does not comfort, that if you look at the moon for long enough night after night, as I have, you will see that the old cartoons are correct, that the moon is, in fact, laughing. But it is not laughing at us, we lonely humans, who are far too small and our lives far too fleeting for it to give us any notice at all.’’ Lauren Groff needs no introductions. Following the modern classic Fates and Furies, a novel so unique, so raw, beautiful and honest, she g

Two major, connected threads in this superb story collection are ambivalence about Florida, and ambivalence about motherhood. There’s an oppressive atmosphere throughout, with environmental catastrophe an underlying threat. Set-ups vary in scope from almost the whole span of a life to one scene. A dearth of named characters emphasizes just how universal the scenarios and emotions are. Groff’s style is like a cross between Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and her u...

Florida by Lauren Groff caught my eye with the stalking panther on the black cover and in block letters, FLORIDA, as we were spending a few months in the southeast part of that magnificent and diverse state. When we travel, I try to read a lot of books pertaining to the region. Therefore, I have been immersed in a lot of wonderful literature of the American South as well as Florida. When I began reading this book of eleven short stories, I was totally enthralled, sometimes frightened and other t...

“Ghosts and Empties” 3 stars “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners” 3 stars “Dogs Go Wolf” 2 stars “The Midnight Zone” 2 stars “Eyewall” 2 stars “For the God of Love, for the Love of God” 2.5 stars “Salvador” 2.5 stars “Flower Hunters” 2 stars “Above and Below” 2 stars “Snake Stories” 2 stars “Yport” 4 stars Each story is slowly smothered by the overwritten prose, characters burdened with the most random thoughts and vaguest gestures. You might be spying on stra...

During a recent visit, Lauren Groff shared that when her husband proposed moving back to his native Florida, she, appalled, made him sign a contract that they would leave in 10 years years. That was more than 12 years ago. In the intervening years, she has come to love the state and all its weirdness, and even gave it the top acknowledgement for this, her excellent book of short stories. She knows she is a short story writer, having entered Amherst as an aspiring poet and having the intelligence...

Here's the thing - I really do love Groff's writing. These short stories are no exception; she is a master craftsman. She paints so well with her words and phrasing. It's just that.....I don't do so well with "dark," and all eleven of these stories are pretty dark. I don't think Lauren Groff likes Florida very much!Here's what I took away from this collection:Florida is mold, feral cats, snakes, bugs, humidity, rot, spanish moss, vines, gators, sinkholes, homelessness, tent cities, termites, mos...

Any book called “Florida” needs to be infused by a thorough sense of place and Lauren Groff does just that. I have been a fan since LOVING Fates and Furies a few years back and have been meaning to pick up more of her books and this very strong collection of short stories has cemented her place in my heart.While not every story is set in Florida, Groff’s protagonists all have a connection to that place, a connection they sometimes strain against and sometimes welcome. Her protagonists are women,...

3.5~4★“When she was pregnant with Jude’s sister, she came into the bathroom to take a cool bath one August night and, without her glasses, missed the three‑foot albino alligator her husband had stored in the bathtub. The next morning, she was gone.”Florida. Hot, sticky, treacherous, or as one character says “damp, dense tangle. An Eden of dangerous things.” I have spent time there, and I now live in a similar climate in Australia, so I can easily imagine myself in many of these stories. “Moving

When it comes to evocative prose, this is top-notch: As the title indicates, Groff creates a strong sense of place and her writing is extremely atmospheric. The damp heat, the glaring sun, the pouring rain, the neighborhoods, the relationships between people and their inner movements, and again and again: wild animals - it's all there, and very much alive. My problem though was that there are a lot of acute observations and empathic explorations of human feelings, but often, I didn't care much f...

These stories feel to me like a continuation of St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell (high praise from me as this remains my favorite short story collection), where Florida remains wild and unsettling and the people managing to live there have some of the same traits. There are also themes of missing parents, negligent/tired mothers, excessive drinking and other escapes, and infidelities that seem tucked away between paragraphs for the careful reader to notice and connect.

Though I’m guessing several of these stories are autobiographical in nature, most have a distancing effect. Even in some of the third-person narrations, for only one thing, we’re not told the name of the main characters. These main characters are mostly wine-drinking mothers, with two young boys, living in Florida though originally from upstate New York, mostly happily married, though the husbands are largely absent. The characters are called “the mother,” “the older/bigger boy,” “the younger/li...

3+ starsI loved Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies. I thought the writing was absolutely brilliant and the story and characters were really original. So I was pretty excited to get my hands on Florida, which is Groff’s latest short story collection. Unfortunately, I can’t rave about the stories in the same way I raved about Fates and Furies. I recognize her talented writing, but there was a flat clever feel to her stories that made it hard for me to feel engaged. Most of the stories focused on wome...