Through the Groves : A Memoir

?ypnotic and tender, this book reminds us that even if we leave our homes, our homes never leave us.??prah Daily A richly evocative coming-of-age memoir set in the Florida orange groves of the 1960s by a Pulitzer Prize?inning journalist Anne Hull grew up in rural Central Florida, barefoot half the time and running through the orange groves her father? family had worked for generations. The ground trembled from the vibrations of bulldozers and jackhammers clearing land for Walt Disney World. ?ook now,?her father told her as they rode through the mossy landscape together. ?t will all be gone.?But the real threat was at home, where Hull was pulled between her idealistic but self-destructive father and her mother, a glamorous outsider from Brooklyn struggling with her own aspirations. All the while, Hull felt the pressures of girlhood closing in. She dreamed of becoming a traveling salesman who ate in motel coffee shops, accompanied by her baton-twirling babysitter. As her sexual identity took shape, Hull knew the place she loved would never love her back and began plotting her escape. Here, Hull captures it all?he smells and sounds of a disappearing way of life, the secret rituals and rhythms of a doomed family, the casual racism of the rural South in the 1960s, and the suffocating expectations placed on girls and women. Vividly atmospheric and haunting, Through the Groves will speak to anyone who? ever left home to cut a path of their own.

Author: Anne Hull

Publisher: Holt Paperbacks

Publication Date: Jun 25, 2024

Number of Pages: NA pages

Language: English

Binding: Paperback

ISBN-10: 125034820X

ISBN-13: 9781250348203