![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/Florida.jpg\")
<\/a>Florida\u2019s gonna get you.<\/p>\nAccording to Laura Groff, that is. Her Florida <\/em>is not the glowing, fun-filled home of orange juice and theme parks. Instead, the inhabitants of her vivid stories about the Sunshine State face danger and disaster at every turn. The snakes in her house at the edge of the swamp drive the mother \u201cAt the Round Earth\u2019s Imagined Corners\u201d\u201d to abandon her son. In \u201cSnake Stories,\u201d Groff warns us \u201cWalk outside in Florida, and a snake will be watching you\u2026\u201d A mother doesn\u2019t come back from a boat trip to get her little girls on an island off the coast, and they lead a feral life in \u201cDogs Go Wolf.\u201d\u00a0During a hurricane-force storm, the narrator\u2019s chickens in \u201cEyewall\u201d are blown apart, and a book with her name in it ends up in Georgia. Threats abound in Groff\u2019s world.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just the outside world that threatens here. If the state of Florida doesn\u2019t get you, the Florida state of mind will. Groff\u2019s genius \u2014 this book will stick with you long after you finish it \u2014 is the inner world that parallels these external threats. Her husband, her father and a boyfriend, all dead, come to visit the narrator of \u201cEyewall,\u201d leading her to conclude \u201cHouses contain us; who can say what we contain?\u201d The sinkhole at the corner of the house in \u201cThe Flower Hunters\u201d doesn\u2019t loom nearly as large as the black hole of anxiety that opens up before the narrator, as she alienates friends and neglects her children. The mother in \u201cGhosts and Empties\u201d has become \u201ca woman who yells,\u201d and because she doesn\u2019t want to be a woman who yells, \u201cwhose little children walk around with frozen, watchful faces,\u201d she goes walking every night through the streets, to quiet her demons and dazzle us with her observations. Other mothers bring their anxiety into play alongside their desperate love, like the one in \u201cThe Midnight Zone\u201d who declares, \u00a0\u201cI would not make dinner, I would not keep schedules, \u2026never ever,\u201d but tries \u201c\u2026to push my love for my sons into them where their bodies were touching my own skin.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s the mother in \u201cYport,\u201d the longest story, who makes the clearest statement about what goes on underneath the surface of these stories. She leaves Florida for France, supposedly to research Maupassant, but she reveals the real reason early in the story:\u00a0 \u201cSurely, her bad pet dread would never think to look for her here.\u201d\u00a0 But it does. It arrives amidst dozens of empty wine bottles, and her bored son, \u201c\u2026something terrible but she can\u2019t look at it, she needs to look away, if she looks at it, it will come even closer to her\u2026she can\u2019t let it, all alone in this cold place with two small boys to care for.\u201d<\/p>\n Some have criticized these stories for being so bleak and lacking hope and resolution. Yes. Groff\u2019s Florida\u00a0<\/em>is not a place to live, but it\u2019s a great place to visit. You\u2019ll see things you\u2019ve never seen before, and remember them for a long time.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bob Moyer finds that there’s much lurking below the surface in Lauren Groff’s view of Florida – and most of it is menacing. Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer FLORIDA. By Lauren Groff. Riverhead Books. 275 pages. $27. Florida\u2019s gonna get you. According to Laura Groff, that is. Her Florida is not the glowing, fun-filled home […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,89],"tags":[1056,1055,143],"class_list":["post-2362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemporary-literary-fiction","category-short-fiction","tag-florida","tag-lauren-groff","tag-short-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2362"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2364,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2362\/revisions\/2364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}