Florida

It's always a challenge to read a book of short stories for a book club discussion since each reader takes away something completely different from each individual story. Some book club members might remember one story better, others may have their own that they want to discuss. That's what happens when you read a book shortly before a book club meeting. But when you read a book of short stories not knowing when it will be discussed? That could be just crazy!

I think that the interesting discussion of Lauren Groff's collection called Florida would be to simply discuss the collection overall without even going into specifics of the stories.

Here's the blurb I read when I decided to vote for this choice for our community book club:

The stories in this collection span characters, towns, decades, even centuries, but Florida—its landscape, climate, history, and state of mind—becomes its gravitational center: an energy, a mood, as much as a place of residence. Groff transports the reader, then jolts us alert with a crackle of wit, a wave of sadness, a flash of cruelty, as she writes about loneliness, rage, family, and the passage of time. With shocking accuracy and effect, she pinpoints the moments and decisions and connections behind human pleasure and pain, hope and despair, love and fury—the moments that make us alive. 

After finishing the entire book, I feel like I was deceived a little bit. In some of the stories, the only connection to Florida was that the protagonist of that particular story was from Florida. And in only one of those cases did a character, and not the main character at all, say that she was not going to return to Florida. I definitely did enjoy the stories that gave the full flavor of Florida much more than the ones that did not.

What the blurb should have said was something about how this collection of stories spans women and issues specific to women. Marriage, being a mother, being a daughter, being a son (in relation to having a mother), being a friend, family, homelessness. That was more the common theme of this collection than "Florida" in whatever way you want to consider it.

It would be interesting to discuss why very few of the characters were given names. It would be interesting to discuss Groff's writing style which is both sparse and wordy - at the same time. As much as giving this book a sideways thumb for the reading experience, I think it could be a very interesting book to discuss.