Florida

April 9, 2018
Ferocious weather and self-destructive impulses plague the characters in this assured collection, the first from Groff (Fates and Furies) since 2009’s Delicate Edible Birds. In “Above and Below,” a grad student loses her university funding and spirals into homelessness. The solo vacationer in “Salvador”—one of three stories set outside Florida—waits out a raging storm with a menacing shopkeeper who, after the harrowing night, “smelled of wet denim and sweated-out alcohol and sour private skin.” Groff’s descriptions shimmer with precision: in “Eyewall,” at the onset of a hurricane that a hallucinating woman endures alone, “the lake goosebumped” and “the house sucked in a shuddery breath.” On a family getaway to a cheerless cabin in the claustrophobic “The Midnight Zone,” a woman notes “how the screens at night pulsed with the tender bellies of lizards.” That story is one of five to feature an unnamed fretful mother and novelist who, in “Yport,” has dragged her two young sons to France while she researches Guy de Maupassant. “Their world is so full of beauty,” she says, fearing for the boys’ future, “the last terrible flash of beauty before the darkness.” A number of the stories hit similar tonal notes (pessimism threatens to sink a few of them), but Groff’s skillful prose, self-awareness, and dark humor leaven the bleakness, making this a consistently rewarding collection.

April 15, 2018
In 11 electric short stories, the gifted Groff (Fates and Furies, 2015, etc.) unpacks the "dread and heat" of her home state.In her first fiction since President Barack Obama named Fates and Furies his favorite book of the year, Groff collects her singing, stinging stories of foreboding and strangeness in the Sunshine State. Groff lives in Gainesville with a husband and two sons, and four of these tales are told from the perspectives of unmoored married mothers of young ones. The first, "Ghosts and Empties," which appeared in the New Yorker, begins with the line, "I have somehow become a woman who yells," a disposition the narrator tries to quell by walking at all hours as "the neighbors' lives reveal themselves, the lit windows domestic aquariums." Groff fans will recognize the descriptive zest instantly. The same quasi-hapless mother seems to narrate "The Midnight Zone," in which she imperils the lives of her boys by falling off a stool and hitting her head while alone with them at a remote cabin, "where one thing [she] liked was how the screens at night pulsed with the tender bellies of lizards." Ditto for the lonely oddballs telling "Flower Hunters" and "Yport," the longest and last story, in which the reckless mother is often coated in alcohol. These are raw, danger-riddled, linguistically potent pieces. They unsettle their readers at every pass. In the dreamy, terrific "Dogs Go Wolf," two little girls are abandoned on an island, their starvation lyrical: "The older sister's body was made of air. She was a balloon, skidding over the ground"; their rescue is akin to a fairy tale. Equally mesmerizing is "Above and Below," in which the graduate student narrator sinks away and dissipates into vivid, exacting homelessness. Even the few stories that dribble off rather than end, such as "For the God of Love, For the Love of God," have passages of surpassing beauty. And Groff gets the humid, pervasive white racism that isn't her point but curdles through plenty of her characters.A literary tour de force of precariousness set in a blistering place, a state shaped like a gun.

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May 1, 2018
The flora and fauna of the Sunshine State vine and prowl through Groff's second short story collection and first book since the smash-hit novel Fates and Furies (2015). With sympathy for her characters and a keen sensitivity to the natural world, Groff gets readers wondering who or what will triumph or succumb. Contrary to all good advice, a woman waits out a hurricane in her historic home and is visited by the ghosts of men she's loved. A writer, the mother of two young sons, appears in several stories. In one, she's alone with the boys in a remote cabin when she falls while changing a lightbulb and then battles to remain calm and awake in a concussed delirium. In Yport, the three spend a summer month in France for the woman's research on Guy de Maupassant, and it will be the boys who teach her something she hadn't realized about the writer she'd long studied. Though 10 of the 11 stories have been previously published, their power as a single unit is undeniable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

March 1, 2018

A frank, rambunctious, generous writer, Groff thought big in her much-heralded novel Fates and Furies. Here, in spot-on language, she effectively provides slice-of-life reading, capturing the scents and sounds of her newly adopted state, Florida. Her portraits aren't of sand, surf, and sunshine; instead, she shows us houses that "rot and droop" in the humidity, the "devilish reek of snakes" at swamp's edge, and an "old hunting camp shipwrecked in twenty miles of scrub" where a panther lurks. But these portraits aren't unaffectionate, and the characters can be satisfyingly tough, though Groff's alter ego in several stories is still getting her bearings. In the opening story, she walks nightly in her transitional neighborhood, seeing few people but keeping herself from becoming a yowling mom. The standout "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners" traces a Florida boy's life from his rough upbringing, his mother's stealing him away to safety, his father's grabbing him back, and his adulthood in the family home, when he confronts the ghost of his let-down father, then joyously greets his wife. VERDICT Well-observed, unexpected writing for fans and more. [See Prepub Alert, 12/11/17.]

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