Tag: haunting

Review: Florida by Lauren Groff

Anna and AlexisLeave a comment

Alexis:

I feel like this is the first book I’ve read for fun (even though my professor recommended that I read it) in a while! I just finished Florida by Lauren Groff, which I meant to read all of this past summer because it generated so much hype.

I haven’t read a good short story collection in a while, even though I always find them very helpful in writing my own short stories. But Florida was a great read; I love the way Groff writes about the Florida landscape. Each short story is very grounded in place, especially in the first couple of stories. The way she writes about Florida is nostalgic yet haunting. She really focuses on the amount of snakes and alligators crawling around the swampy landscape.

My favorite stories were “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners,” “Eyewall,” and “Above and Below.” The first is a coming of age story, full of snakes and snake imagery; the second is a ghost/hurricane story; and the last is about a wannabe professor who finds herself recently homeless.

Most of Groff’s stories lack quotation marks, which adds to the haunting feel of her writing. She definitely has a way with language, and all of her lines feel poignant. Overall, I definitely recommend it!

VERDICT: 5 stars

Review: Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed

Anna and AlexisLeave a comment

Alexis:

Here are some words to describe Gather the Daughters: disturbing, haunting, cultish. The book focuses on very dark, heavy themes, including pedophilia, child marriage, and incest. 

In Gather the Daughters, a group of people live on an island, where very summer, the children run free. But when the girls start their periods, they are considered to be women, and must marry and have children as fast as possible. The rest of the world is post-apocalyptic, and is simply called “the wastelands.” Fathers are encouraged to groom their daughters from a young age, but are supposed to stop once the girls hit puberty. 

The book tells the story of multiple girls. Their lives are very similar and overlap. Caitlin is eager for knowledge and is allowed to read books from the wastelands; Janey, at seventeen, has been starving herself for years in order to prevent her period from coming.

This was a haunting and brutal book to read. While Melamed’s descriptions and writing are good, the book was slow-paced. I also wish the ending was more radical and made more of an impact.

Overall, I can’t really say I enjoyed reading this book, and I did skim through some of the middle. But it definitely made me think.

VERDICT: 3 stars