“It's marvelous to know another person's entire literary canon by heart. It's like knowing their secret personal language.”
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Alice Fivey, fatherless since she was seven, is left in the care of her relatives at ten when her love-wearied mother loses custody of her and enters "the San," submitting to years of psychiatric care. She is moved from place to place, remaining still while others mold her into someone different from her namesake mother. Alice consoles herself with books, and she herself becomes a storyteller who must build her own home word by word. Florida is her story, told in brief scenes of spare beauty as Alice moves ever further from the desolation of her mother's actions, into adulthood and closer to the meaning of her own experience.
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Christine Schutt
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“It's marvelous to know another person's entire literary canon by heart. It's like knowing their secret personal language.”
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“What had been built to seem so solid was fragile in the face of time because time is impassive, more animal than human. Time would not care if you fell out of it. It would continue on withou...”
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“Men were not as disciplined or as smart as women, she though: men almost always took what they were offered, their appetites too crude and raw to put up much resistance. There were like chil...”
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“Then she wants to say that, oh, Christ, of course she knows, the condescension Europeans shower on Americans is not always warranted; she's a novelist, which is tantamount to being a one-wom...”
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