A nice collection of dark stories where the threat can be nature, society, or humans themselves. Some work better than others, but all contain the same strength of writing found in her novels.

An evocative, unsettling read. Dark and claustrophobic, dazzling imagery propels you from story-to-story.

This powerful collection of 11 stories cover a range of subjects, but Florida is present in all of them, as background or foreground, with its storms and sinkholes and snakes and general air of menace and threat and danger, often reflecting the characters’ inner world. I’m not a great reader of short stories but I found this collection more compelling than most. Women are at the centre of all of them, especially mothers, whom she examines with insight and compassion. The writing is lyrical and sensuous but never overdone, and the sense of place is vivid and atmospheric. Well worth reading.

This novel is set in the deep swamps of Florida. I was never unable to untangle the murky tales and found each messy and overpowering. There was none of the charm that had absorbed me in her debut novel Fates and Furies. Each story felt unforgettable and a bit of a mess.

An interesting selection of short stories from Groff, which are all set in and around - you guessed it - Florida!

I particularly enjoyed the range of voices in these stories, some characters were more believable than others but the setting is depicted in such a visceral way that I have to admit Florida may have slipped down my list of places to visit!

My favourite story is the first in the collection as I feel this was the strongest and most intriguing in the book. I have yet to read Fates and Furies but this collection has certainly encouraged me to bump it up my to be read pile.

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 skillfully 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 we remember that the natural world can never be fully tamed – whether because of natural disasters or the unseen presence of a lurking man-eater – as well as the more modern fear of being ‘out of range’ ie, cut off and isolated in some way.

Florida pervades this collection in subtler ways too, with the thick, stifling air of a humid day translating to an oppressive atmosphere of middle-class malaise. Groff’s characters behave in similar ways even when the locale changes (one story is set in Brazil, two in France), and it’s hard sometimes not to feel like these are all variations on the same woman, suffocating slowly on her own life.

Generally, I prefer when authors use the short story format as an opportunity to take risks, to play with the form and ideas in ways that couldn’t sustain a longer book. The stories should feel fully-formed and self-contained, not like a sample chapter or the embryonic beginnings of a novel-that-never-was. The two interludes in France (‘For the Love of God, For the Love of God’, and ‘Yport’) felt like the latter and as such, a bit unsatisfying.

The most memorable piece was ‘Above and Below’, about a young academic’s slide into homelessness. Brilliant and haunting and brimming with the kind of writing that can conjure an indelible image with a single sentence. Also terrific were ‘Eyewall’, about a woman waiting out a destructive hurricane alone in her house, and ‘Dogs Go Wolf’, about two very young girls trying to survive on an island after the adults disappear.

4.5 stars

Eleven stories; eleven people with a connection to the state of Florida, which in itself is a character in this newest offering from Lauren Groff. Florida's dense landscapes, its damp climate, its energy and its history come together to form a wonderful collection of engrossing stories about mostly women, mothers and their families. The coherence in these stories lies in their ability to unnerve you; to make you feel like the ground you stand on could crack and disintegrate under your feet at any moment, and that life as you know it - the everyday - is hanging by a very thin and fragile thread.

There are a wealth of characters here: a mother on her nightly walks around her neighborhood looks in on her neighbors, trying to keep a cap on her anger and frustration for the sake of her family (“I have somehow become a woman who yells”); two young children abandoned on a small fishing island, alone and fending for themselves; a mother vacationing in a remote cabin, her children looking after her with tenderness when she is concussed while changing a light bulb, waiting for her husband to return; a woman taking refuge from a hurricane; a graduate, recently evicted, living out of her car, learning the real meaning of true wealth. In each story the same kind of scenario appears: a protagonist is imperilled by an event - let it be an injury, a major life change, a weather event or some other extremity - and there are visitations or reminders of her past. The threat of sickness or danger lurks everywhere: there is a hint at a cancer diagnosis; there are alligators, panthers, snakes; stray dogs are mentioned, sink holes, theives and stalkers loom, and while not everything materialises, the threat itself - the very evocation of fear - is enough to challenge your senses and throw you off kilter, resulting in a truly engaging and electrifying reading experience.

One of Groff's main themes is the mistreatment or abandonment of children by their parents. The mother in “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners” walks away, leaving her son with a cold, inattentive, snake-obsessed father. In another story, a babysitter finds that her charges’ mother will not be coming home - she has been arrested for prostitution. The two sisters in one of the strongest stories, “Dogs Go Wolf,” are left alone in a swampy, isolated cabin, starving, without water or electricity. There is a fairy tale overlay to many of the stories, and more challenge you to wonder about the things in life that are beyond our control: the natural elements and energies that surround us. There is a play with dystopian fiction here, and just a hint of magical realism, and in its entirety, Florida is a captivating read that is both eerie and utterly refreshing.

Mothers delve into reasons for their anger. Women push back against the way the world is now, and the ways they are expected to live; the perfect mothers, wives, friends and lovers they are expected to be, the image they are expected to portray to the world. These women are in the midst of awareness and are fighting against the things in their lives that are threatening to imprison them.

Uncomfortable reading at times but nevertheless brilliant. Groff's prose is stunning. Highly recommended.

In “Flower Hunters”, one of the stories in this collection, an angst-ridden mother finds some solace in reading about William Bartram, an 18th century naturalist who, like her had once been “a northerner dazzled by the frenzied flora and fauna” of Florida. She takes an almost perverse pleasure in imagining her homely neighbourhood as a yet undeveloped “damp, dense tangle. An Eden of dangerous things”. The protagonist completely forgets that it’s Halloween, and, as a consequence, her two boys must make do with improvised costumes. “For the older boy, she cut eyeholes in a white sheet for an old-style ghost, though it rankled, a white boy in a white sheet, Florida still the Deep South”. That night, while the boys and their dad traipse off to a Halloween party, she stays at home, reading about Bartram, listening to the rain and worrying about the sinkhole she is pretty sure is forming and threatening to gobble up her house.

The “Florida” of the title is less of a physical, geographical setting, than a complex of feelings, ideas and associations. The images in "Flower Hunters" are quite representative of this literary place, where the genteel, civilised exterior, is constantly ambushed by the dangerous and the unexpected; where relationships are brittle and class wars are still rife; where even the nicest of persons might be monsters in disguise. Several of the tales portray natural perils which, besides being symbolic, are also quite literal. "Eyewall", a ghost-story in all but name, takes place against the backdrop of a battering hurricane. Storms are a central feature of several of the stories, panthers and alligators roam in others, whilst the Biblical association between snakes and evil is reprised in “Snake Stories”. The feeling of menace is sometimes expressed in tales which skirt the Gothic – “Dogs go Wolf” is a Florida-set (where else?) re-imagining of myths and legends of feral children.

The pull of Florida is such that even in the stories set away from the state (and from North America, even), the same feelings and fears hold sway. For the protagonist of “Salvador”, the Brazilian town is as rain-soaked as home, and equally remindful of the inadequacies of a life spent tending to a bed-ridden mother. “For the God of Love, for the Love of God” is set in France, where a Florida couple visit an old friend, now married to a Swiss baron. As relationships and fortunes collapse, the story turns into a grim comedy-of-manners which I can imagine made into a French art-house movie, perhaps a sort of darker version of Le Prénom. France is, again, the backdrop of “Yport”, which follows a mother and her two boys on a journey to the places associated with Guy du Maupassant, an author whom the mother is unenthusiastically researching. The harried mother realizes that she hates the guy – both as man and as writer – but also takes another an important lesson home with her – “of all places in the world, she belongs in Florida. How dispiriting to learn this of herself”.

To be honest, “dispiriting” is an adjective which could also fit most of the stories in the collection. There are also themes, concerns and images, which keep returning obsessively, making this an anthology to savour, rather than to read in one sitting. And yes, Florida does deserve to be “savoured”. In just a few pages, Groff can draw a character worthy of a novel, conjure a setting and a mood, surprise the reader with a flash of insight, an unexpected image. At her best, Groff can indeed give us an “Eden of dangerous things”.

Best title of the year. No author can compare, Lauren Groff best writer out there currently.. Read aloud, yes! AND I find myself going back to copy down sentence phrasing.
The stories are regional calling to mind a great documentary of the Florida Mermaid Women..... yet pin down the angst of and
the tribulations of mothers and humans in tense sociopolitical times. The sons in the stories are so real and decent and just enough of
the husband is revealed/concealed to pique the imagination. No false positives here, reading Lauren Groff always gives one permission
to express ones own deep dark thoughts.

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 in the humidity was like forcing my way through wet silk.”

The Florida storms are horrific and frightening and wonderfully described. Standing next to the edge of a sinkhole in the rain must be terrifying, too. Climate change gets more than a passing mention in a few stories, because Florida, of course, is already being inundated by rising seas and hit by heavy storms.

One woman has exhausted her best friend’s patience with her constant worries about the future to the point that the friend has asked to take a break from her. She just wishes she could take a break from herself!

Most of the main characters are of a youngish or early middle-age group, although there is one in particular who worried about becoming what is often referred to a ‘woman of a certain age’. She had rented an apartment in Salvador for a two-week escape from caring for her elderly mother. Her guilt-ridden sisters paid for her holiday every year, so she goes to live it up.

“Helena was in that viscous pool of years in her late thirties when she could feel her beauty slowly departing from her. She had been lovely at one time, which slid into pretty, which slid into attractive, and now, if she didn’t do something major to halt the slide, she’d end up at handsomely middle‑aged, which was no place at all to be.”

I’d be happy with “handsomely middle-aged”, but then I’m not trying to party hearty, fitting in a year’s worth of escapades into a couple of weeks. Poor Helena.

There’s no question that Groff is a good writer. I think if I’d read any of these stories separately in The New Yorker Magazine or other publications where her writing appears, I’d have seriously enjoyed them. As it is, I found them repetitive and unrelentingly dismal.

From the woman who goes running to escape – her husband, her kids, the nightly chores of bath and bed (or maybe life itself) – to the woman who takes her two little boys to France to escape Florida, with its storms, snakes and deadly creatures in the dark. There is a lot of bemoaning their condition and a lot of drinking of wine. Bottle after bottle, drunk alone.

I felt as if all these women could be summed up by the one who took her little boys overseas, hoping to enjoy a voyage of self-discovery.

“She doesn’t belong in France, perhaps she never did; she was always simply her flawed and neurotic self, even in French. Of all places in the world, she belongs in Florida. How dispiriting, to learn this of herself.”

Dispirited is how I felt most of the time while reading this, and annoyed, because it is obvious to me that this is someone whose writing I’d enjoy, but not about women like this who all seem to be slightly different but equally miserable versions of each other. I waited a few days to write this, and I have to admit I find it hard to remember any of them separately. They’ve all melded together, single, married, rich or poor.

I will definitely look for Groff’s highly acclaimed first book, though.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House / William Heinemann for the preview copy from which I’ve quoted.

Bloody brilliant. Edgy, immersive, flawless, insightful, compelling. I found myself quickly within the world of each character, so much so that I almost wished it wasn't a short story collection but a series of novel proposals.

I haven't yet read Fates and Furies, but it is certainly going into my TBR pile after whizzing through Florida.

P.S. Jude was my favourite. Oh, Jude.

Absolutely brilliant. A collection of very different, flawlessly-written stories, loosely connected to each other through an association with the state of Florida. Just spectacular; I could not recommend this more highly.

My god, can Lauren Groff write or what?! I haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading her bestseller, Fates & Furies, but this short story collection showcases a master craftswoman whose sentences reverberate with depth and power.

Each short story is inspired by Lauren’s home state – though not all are set there – but there’s a ripple of darkness that flows through every one of them, from the two young girls who become feral after being abandoned by their mother in the dense everglades, to the unsettled housewife who wanders the shadowy suburban streets at night to just breathe from the suffocating claustrophobia of domestic life. Awesome.

Holy crap, this book is absolutely outstanding. Safe to say, it’s my favourite book of the year thus far. The stories in Florida crackle with tension and are heady with the oppressive heat and humidity of the state. Geoff’s writing is like a knife, neatly dissecting the characters, both cruel and caring. The female characters in this book are so strong and so real, each imperfect in their own ways. They are unapologetically flawed yet moral and caring, the wives and mothers we all know. I’d be hard pressed to pick my favourite story, they all drag you into them immediately and leave you wanting more once their done. I cannot wait to get my hands on more of her writing and I think I’ll be going out to purchase my own copy of this as well. I cannot recommend enough.
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Thanks to @netgalley and @penguinrhuk for an ARC of this title. 💖

This is a collection of compelling short stories, most of them set in Florida and the protagonists are all women. Most of them have children, husbands (who are dead, distant, or have left), but they are all lonely and are facing a difficult moment in their lives.
The themes of the stories rage from family to friendship, from loneliness to depression. It seems that in every story there is danger and darkness, that something bad is about to happen (mostly snakes and storms). The author's writing is beautiful and insightful, but this is not a light read as most of the stories are unsettling and hard to get through so proceed with caution.

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, depressed and difficult and wonderfully flawed women, often mothers with a difficult and believable relationship to motherhood. I loved the way these women are allowed to be difficult while Groff shines an unflinching spotlight on them and their flaws and the way they are suffocating in their own skin. I adore that they are allowed to be unpleasant while ultimately staying sympathetic. I do wish this unpleasantness did not always also show itself in a disdain for their own and other bodies. Once I noticed that I could not unsee it. I would have liked there to be more variety in their deepest flaws because as it is the fixation on (often overweight) bodies feels unkind and unnecessary.

Lauren Groff is in perfect command of her language; her sentences are sharp in the way that I like them to be in realistic short fiction (comparisons to Roxane Gay came to mind here and that is obviously one of the highest compliments I can give a short story writer). The stories are meticulously structured and surprising while her perfect tone is recognizable in all of them.

Now, excuse me while I buy everything else she has ever written.

Like Carl Hiaasan, Groff is not afraid to look at the underbelly of Floridian life - the side that British visitors to the state don't see, The stories are dark and creepy - they aren't my usual read but I was hooked, even with the nightmares!

I feel florida is my ‘home’ even though I have only been once last year- it has seeped into my skin and I can not wait to get back there. It is everything you expect it to be and more. So I was so excited to read this collection of short stories. It was brilliant to see how florida became the main character in each story, it found its way into the telling with ease, and as an avid florida lover this was brilliant. The stories are haunting, filled with conflict, love, resolutions, consequence- all of life.

I have read and enjoyed work by Lauren Groff before so I was looking forward to this collection of short stories. This is now one of the best books I've read this year. The stories are compelling and evocative and wonderfully character-driven with sentences so lyrical I highlighted my favourites.

This is a memorable collection of unsettling stories, all linked in some way to Florida. There is an excellent evocation of the setting as sweaty, dangerous and hostile.