November 2024
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The Florida Book Review features reviews of books with Florida settings or subjects, as well as event coverage and feature essays about Florida's literary history. We are glad you have found us here at FloridaBookReview.net. We are adding new reviews and features all the time. Come in and sample our reviews and features. Read our annual Miami Book Fair Blog. If you'd like to join our mailing list click here. |
New at FBR:
Event Coverage: FBR's Miami Book Fair Blog: November 2024
The Florida Book Review's annual coverage of the Miami Book Fair is back for 2024 with the weekend of Nov. 22-24, the Street Fair and loads of in-person readings and events.
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FBR's team will cover the Book Fair with posts and photos.
Many of the presentations will also be viewable online during the Fair and thereafter. Click here to read our reporting of the 2024 Fair. Take a look at the schedule: https://www.miamibookfair.com/ |
One Brilliant Flame: "A powder keg of passion and longing."
"Joy Castro’s One Brilliant Flame takes us to a Key West still known as Cayo Hueso, or the Island of Bones, in 1886. Populated by cigar rollers, former slaves, battle-worn insurgents, factory owners, and artists who across decades escaped slavery in Cuba, it has a prosperous cigar trade and a small, thriving community. Now a Spanish Royal decree has abolished Cuba's slavery and indentured servitude, and a movement for independence is brewing there. Exposing the class, racial, and gender biases that governed conventional behaviors, Castro depicts a powder keg of passion and longing," writes Lauren Rivera Fernández.
In her review, Rivera Fernández delineates how Castro brings readers close to the three young people who are the primary first person narrators, with other voices joining as the action widens. As she writes, "Castro’s lyrical and fluid craft makes One Brilliant Flame a page-turner. Overlapping references to topics or events serve as touchstones for the reader to follow the sequence of actions, and the accretion of distinct voices does not feel contrived or confusing. Instead, it is a pleasure to enter and exit the same moments from different perspectives, satisfying or, even better, expanding our curiosity." Read the full review on our Fiction Page. |
Florida's Healing Waters: Gilded Age Mineral Springs, Seaside Resorts, and Health Spas
"This is a beautiful book. Beautiful to look at, to hold, to thumb through its heavy, lightly glossed pages. University Press of Florida gave Rick Kilby’s Florida’s Healing Waters the generous treatment it deserves for its hundreds of photos and other images from the heyday of Florida’s mineral springs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when people flocked here to bathe in and drink the water." At the same time, writes FBR's Bob Morison, Kilby tells the story of the discovery, rises, and falls of Florida's mineral springs, the visitors who flocked to them, and the range of healing they offered. "The Fountain of Youth Bath House near St. Petersburg promised hot sulphur and salt baths as nature’s sure cure for rheumatism, neuralgia, and kidney, liver, and skin trouble. Dyspepsia and gastritis got a lot of play. The water at Magnesia Springs near Gainesville specialized in kidney and bladder complications. Some spas touted the precise chemical composition of their offerings, and it was the norm for the water to smell and taste foul, but only Punta Gorda’s has tested radioactive. Suffice it to say that the Sunshine State was hyping its waters long before they were packaged as swampland real estate." Learn more on our Florida History page. |
Mission Libertad: A Y.A. Reconsideration
Emily Chaffins takes a fresh look at Mission Libertad by Lizette M. Lantigua, a YA novel set in the 1970s, which Chaffins first read when it was published in 2012 and revisits now reading from an adult perspective. As Chaffins writes, "The novel tells the story of Luis “Luisito” Ramirez Jemot, a fourteen-year-old boy struggling to survive in late 1970’s communist Cuba. Luisito’s world is turned upside down when he and his parents set off on a makeshift raft. They navigate towards the United States while having to leave Luisito’s abuela behind."
The action follows both the adjustment of Luisito and his family to life in the U.S. and a suspense plot in progress. "Before he fled Cuba, Abuela entrusted a coded message to him, instructing him to tell no one. He must find a way to travel from Maryland to Miami’s Shrine of Our Lady of Charity to deliver the message to a priest who can help to save an invaluable relic of Cuban history before it is lost. Meanwhile, two Cuban spies watch his every move." As Chaffins writes on our Young Adult page, "If you’re looking for a spy thriller, a family drama, and a fish-out-of-water story rolled into one, Mission Libertad is for you." |
On our Florida Food & Drink Page:
"How a sandwich has come to represent so much for people—nostalgia, community, exile, and patria— is remarkable," writes Madari Pendas, in her review of The Cuban Sandwich: A History in Layers, by Andrew T. Huse, Bárbara C. Cruz, and Jeff Houck.
"The handsomely-designed book includes interviews with various chefs and Cuban restaurant owners from all over the world. The chapters chronicling the history of the sandwich are intercut with colored photographs of original menus, family businesses, bustling kitchens, rising loaves of Cuban bread halved by a palmetto leaf, and more. This structure emphasizes the continuation of traditions and the global infatuation with the sandwich." Read Pendas's review on our Florida Food & Drink page, though when she quotes you may want to heed her warning, "Some books you can't read on an empty stomach." |
Feature: Social Distancing, A Return Home, and Elizabeth Bishop's "Questions of Travel"
In the latest feature in our Florida Literary Landmarks Series, Freesia McKee recalls seeing Elizabeth Bishop's former house in Key West, "shuttered and overgrown," in May 2019, and the happiness of learning later that year about the Key West Literary Seminar's acquisition of the house with the aim of restoring it to be a future headquarters and gathering place. In the solitude of the pandemic, McKee considers the many aspects of restlessness and home, distraction and isolation to be found in Bishop's life and work. Read McKee's essay, "'Should we have stayed at home,/ wherever that may be?' Social Distancing, Return Home, and Elizabeth Bishop's 'Questions of Travel." |
Feature: Alice Hoffman's Turtle Moon, a Classic Florida Read
A visit to the patients' library of a hospital where her mother is undergoing surgery leads Natalie Havlina to find among the used books for sale Alice Hoffman's Turtle Moon, the novel she first experienced on tape cassettes during on a roadtrip with her mother from Idaho to Montana in 1993. When she opens the physical book now, to her surprise she finds: "The story takes place in Florida. The bizarre, magical place that has been etched in my memory for the last quarter of a century is Florida, the same place where I have landed unexpectedly..." Read Havlina's essay about rediscovering Hoffman's award-winning novel, the latest in our series on Classic Florida Reads. |
Feature: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Palmetto-Leaves
Novelist Mary Anna Evans looks at Harriet Beecher Stowe's influential 1873 book Palmetto-Leaves, which grew from essays written after her post-Civil War acquisition of a winter home in Mandarin.
The book became an "early, important example of Florida narratives urging people to 'Come on down!'” while today standing as a record of the wilderness she fell in love with, before the influx arrived. As Evans writes, Stowe "was careful not to promise unadulterated paradise, saying that 'Florida, like a piece of embroidery, has two sides to it—one side all tag-rag and thrums, without order or position; and the other side showing flowers and arabesques and brilliant coloring.'" |
Florida Nature and Environment
"Many of us are drawn to Florida for its natural beauty, captured by skilled photographers like Lynne Buchanan. And many of us come here as a result—enough that Florida is now the third most populous state in the nation, and is experiencing more of a burden on its fragile ecosystems and natural resources than ever before," writes FBR's James Barrett-Morison.
Florida's Changing Waters: A Beautiful World in Peril, adapted into a book from an exhibit of Buchanan's photographs, "stunningly illustrates how Florida's delicate inland, estuarine, and marine waters are being irreparably altered." Learn more on our Florida Nature and Envronment page. Award-winning Florida Books
Florida Fiction
Check out FBR's reviews of award-winning Florida fiction:
Florida Crime Fiction
Catch up with more Florida mysteries on our Crime writing page.
Classic Florida Crime
Florida Travel
Florida Classic Science Fiction: Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys
Post-Apocalyptic Florida, Fifties Style
Classic Florida Memoirs
Moving to Miami: Classic YA
From the Seventies: Schemers and a Geriatric Sleuth, a Classic Florida Read
Dina Weinstein takes a look at Robert Kimmel Smith's 1976 novel, Sadie Shapiro in Miami, and finds those Florida crime staples, comically wacky building schemes and swindlers, but the book's real strength is its "timelessly funny and refreshing protagonist," Sadie Shapiro, "an unlikely geriatric celebrity." Read this Florida Book Review Reconsideration our Florida Crime Writing page.
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Florida Fiction
Florida Crime Writing
Florida Nonfiction
Florida Sports:
Florida History:
Memoir:
Florida Music
Florida Poetry
Of Steve Lambert's poetry collection, Connor Nelson writes, "Heat Seekers is the dirt underneath the fingernail of Florida—people you look past at the gas station, shady street corner business you pretend not to notice, the insect comfortable on your motel room ceiling, death—and, like a Floridian, these poems don’t mind showing a little skin." Read the review on our Poetry page.
FBR's Miami Book Fair Blog
More Florida Nonfiction
On our Nature & Environment Page
On our Children's Books Page
"Beautifully illustrated and fun-filled, Gator Dad tells the story of a stay-at-home dad with three young children," writes our reviewer, Jaimie Eubanks of this book from stay-at-home dad and award- winning author and illustrator Brian Lies. Read the review.
Florida Young Adult Fiction
Special Feature: Kerouac's Orlanda Blues
Of Jack Kerouac's two periods living in Florida, "The first stint, in Orlando, stretching between 1957-58, was incredibly productive though relatively unknown," writes Ariel Francisco, who finds clues in Orlanda Blues, a section of Kerouac's Book of Blues. Read our feature here.
Above: The cottage in Orlando where Kerouac and his mother rented rooms in the back. Today the restored house is the site of The Kerouac Project, which runs writers' residencies and other programs in Central Florida. A Land Remembered: A Reconsideration
Patrick D. Smith's novel A Land Remembered has become a beloved classic, taught in Florida schools. After reading it for the first time, Pamela Akins says, "every newcomer to the Sunshine State should read this 1984 action-packed saga of the taming of the Florida frontier. It not only offers a glimpse of what has come before, but what we are fast losing." Read more on our Classic Florida Reads page.
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