In “Dogs Go Wolf,” two sisters (ages four and seven) are left alone by their mother and her friends in an abandoned fishing village off the coast of Florida after a hurricane. Instead, the wind picks up, gliding the canoe back to shore. He believes his father's ghost is in the boat with him and that he is about to die. When his wife takes their daughter off to college, Jude rows out on the lake on their property in a canoe and loses his oars. Years later, Jude wakes up one morning to find he has inexplicably gone deaf. They sell off the swampland surrounding Jude's father's house to a nearby university and have a daughter. He marries and returns to Florida with his wife.

When his father is killed by a snake, Jude goes to Boston where he attends college and is reunited with his mother. His mother, seeking a better life for herself away from her domineering husband, leaves Jude with his father, and he grows up lonely and surrounded by the snakes his father collects. “At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners” tells the story of Jude, a young boy who lives with his parents in a Florida swamp. At the end of the story, she imagines herself at home in bed with her children, but continues walking. She reflects on the gradual gentrification of her neighborhood and the city's efforts to push out the homeless population. She observes her neighbors, including an obese teenager on a treadmill and a friend drying herself off after a shower. In the first story, “Ghosts & Empties,” an unnamed narrator describes taking late night walks through her neighborhood in order to ease her chronic anxiety, which is partially related to her fears of climate change.

New York: Riverhead Books, 2018.įlorida is a collection of 11 short stories linked by common themes and its characters' relationship to the state for which it is named.

The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Groff, Lauren.

Florida by Lauren Groff