The Florida Book Review

October 2024

Welcome!

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:

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."

Event Coverage: FBR's Miami Book Fair Blog: November 2023

The Florida Book Review's annual coverage of the Miami Book Fair was back for 2023 with the weekend of Nov. 17-19, the Street Fair and loads of in-person readings and events. Check out our coverage here.

The calm before the Street Fair in November. Photo by Giselda Aguiar

FBR's team covered the book fair with posts and photos. Click here to read our reporting as we blogged the Fair.

Many of the presentations will also be viewable online during the Fair and thereafter.

Take a look at the schedule: https://www.miamibookfair.com/

Feature: Social Distancing, A Return Home, and Elizabeth Bishop's "Questions of Travel"

Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927-1979 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983)

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."

Elizabeth Bishop in Key West, ca. 1937

Feature: Alice Hoffman's Turtle Moon, a Classic Florida Read

Tutle Moon, by Alice Hoffman, Putnam and Sons, 1992

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.

Turtle Moon, Brilliance Audio, 2009

Feature: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Palmetto-Leaves

Tourist postcard of Stowe's home in Mandarin, Florida

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.'"

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Read our feature: "The book of Nature here is never shut": A Reconsideration of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Palmetto-Leaves.

Florida Nature and Environment

"What draws us to wildness, despite its challenges? And what are the ethics of visiting the rare places that remain semi-untouched by humans? And of staying?" asks Shana Graham.
"These questions are at the heart of After Life as a Human, Laura Valeri’s lush, graceful, and penetrating meditation on paradise, in the form of wildness, lost and sought." Read Graham's review of Valeri's essays about her experiences on Dog Island, "a speck of land 3.5 miles off-shore from Carrabelle, FL," in the Gulf of Mexico, new on our Florida Nonfiction Page.

"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

Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Díaz has received the Whiting Award in Nonfiction and the Florida Book Award Gold Medal for Nonfiction.

Our reviewer Kristin Gallagher writes, "While Ordinary Girls is a memoir, it is about much more than one girl’s experience. Díaz builds an ongoing community narrative... so that the result is also a love letter to girls and their stories, a celebration of those who survive and an ode to those who don’t."

Read Gallagher's review on our Nonfiction Page.

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead has won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.

In her review published earlier this year, Contributing Editor Pamela Akins says that in The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead "fictionalizes one of the most horrific tales in Florida history: the cruelty, torture and murder that occurred at the Dozier School for Boys where unmarked graves of missing children are still being discovered. Renaming the school the Nickel Academy, Whitehead gives life to what happened there through the story of two African-American boys in the 1960s."

Read Akins' revew on our Fiction Page.

Florida Fiction

"Reading Mostly Dead Things explores what we don’t want to admit about ourselves, taking the most vulnerable bits of flesh that we thought we’d hidden from everyone and displaying them like bloody works of art," writes our reviewer Michael Sheriff of Kristen Arnett's novel, which centers on a family's taxidermy shop in Central Florida, in the wake of the father's suicide, leading to "strange and darkly humorous events that force the characters to confront everything they have tried so hard to avoid." Read more on our Fiction Page.

"Belle Boggs’ The Gulf gives us an engaging fish-out-of-water tale that seeks to explore the gap between the opposite sides of our current political and religious divide," says our reviewer Kate Gilman. The heroine is Marianne, a "pro-choice pro-environment, atheist poet" carrying heavy student loan debts, who, when opportunity beckons, "decamps to Sarasota to launch the Genesis Inspiration Writing Program, a low-residency master of fine arts program for Evangelical Christians," at a fortuitously available delapidated old Florida motel.
Read more on our Fiction Page.

In his collection Dead Aquarium, "Caleb Michael Sarvis often immerses the reader in a realistic narrative for several pages before an unreal or absurd element briefly intrudes, such as when, in the novella 'Emerson,' a character talks about his job selling 'lunar real estate,' writes our reviewer Phil LaPadula. "But after such brief moments of fantasy, the reader returns to stark reality, following quirky and tragic characters living on the fringes in Florida." Read the review on our Fiction page.

Check out FBR's reviews of award-winning Florida fiction:

Florida Crime Fiction

In Lori Roy's The Disappearing, Lane Fielding, now a divorced mother of two, returns after twenty years to her hometown of Waddell, Florida, only, writes Ed Irvin, "to find that small towns never forget and history has a way of repeating itself." The press is agog at reports of alleged abuses by her now-aged father at the boys' school he once ran, and new mysteries raise tensions higher. "This novel is Southern Gothic at its finest, featuring flawed characters you empathize with because Roy makes you understand their motivations as authentic, although misguided," says Irvin. Read the review on our Crime Writing page.

Lauren Doyle Owens’ debut novel, The Other Side of Everything, takes the reader to Seven Springs, Florida, where, writes Victoria Calderin, "the murder of Adel Minor in her own kitchen sets the stage for the unraveling and subsequent slow braiding of the lives of the residents of this town who are forced to reevaluate and confront tragedies both large and small when faced with the presence of a serial killer." Read the review on our Crime Writing page.

Catch up with more Florida mysteries on our Crime writing page.

Classic Florida Crime

      Natalie Havlina takes a fresh look at John Katzenbach's first psychological thriller, In the Heat of the Summer, one of the novels that launched the Florida crime fiction boom:
     "The story begins in 1975 with the discovery of a sixteen-year-old girl’s body, bound and shot in the back of the head, execution style. Protagonist Malcolm Anderson, reporter for the fictional Miami Journal, scoops the story and sets out in search of further material, putting the book on what appears to be a standard amateur sleuth path.
     "Then the killer calls."
     Read Havlina's reconsideration on our Classic Florida Reads page.

Florida Travel

In Cathy Salustri's Backroads of Paradise: a Journey to Rediscover Old Florida, the author follows the auto routes laid out in the 1939 Works Progress Administration publication Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State. "More than just an updated guide to these driving tours, Salustri’s book is also a memoir, a meditation, a lament for the Florida that was, and an outpouring of love for the 'not just one Florida, but many real Floridas' that are," writes Natalie Havlina. Read the review.

Florida Classic Science Fiction: Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys

Daniel Santos rereads Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman's 2005 fantasy novel set largely in Florida, and finds it still dark and hilarious.
In addition, because of Gaiman's use of Traditional African and Caribbean religions, Santos says, "...those interested in seeing a different, more realistic, side of Floridian culture and beliefs will find this book to be intriguing." Read this FBR reconsideration.

Post-Apocalyptic Florida, Fifties Style

Frank Tota reconsiders Pat Frank's vision of post-apocalyptic Florida in his 1959 novel Alas, Babylon here.

Classic Florida Memoirs

"Jesse Lee Kercheval’s Space can be described as a memoir masquerading as cultural anthropology or cultural anthropology masquerading as memoir, but either way, it is a compelling read," writes Madeleine Blais. Read her reconsideration of this just-reissued award-winning book that takes the reader to 1966 Cocoa as Florida moved from swamp to space age.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was not prepared for the challenges she'd face when she when she moved to "the segregated backwoods of Alachua County, Florida, in the 1930s." But, says Lauren Rivera of Rawlings' 1942 memoir Cross Creek, "She prevails, thanks to the advice and intervention of neighbors, her ability to write about the experience, and her gun."

Rivera's reconsideration is on our Classic Florida Reads page.

Moving to Miami: Classic YA

Irving and Me, published in 1967, was written by New Yorker cartoonist and popular writer for young people Syd Hoff. 1977 marked the debut of Judy Blume's Starring Sally Freedman as Herself. Both authors were themselves transplants to Florida, and their books tell the stories of young people uprooted to Miami. Dina Weinstein (a transplant, too) reconsiders these two Young Adult books on our Classic Florida Reads page.

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.

Florida Fiction

"An exile is never done mourning the loss of a country," writes Madari Pendás about Cecilia M. Fernandez's short story collection Grieving for Guava, which focuses on characters who left Cuba for Florida. "Whether a recently-arrived journalist, an older immigrant who still smells “the pungent aroma of the cafecito hot on the stove, gurgling up like a fountain spray,” or a seamstress watching the rafters’ crisis on the news, searching for the faces of family and friends, all march forward while continually looking back." Read Pendás's review on our Fiction Page.

Florida Crime Writing

Tampa Bay Noir, edited by Collette Bancroft, presents new crime fiction from an array of distinguished contributors who, writes FBR Contributing Editor Pamela Akins, "know the feel of salty air and summer humidity, the sound of palms rattling in the breeze, and the rage of wind and water when a Cat 4 storm comes ashore." The result is a collection of stories Akins finds "so rich, detailed and engaging, that it’s hard to say one stands out over another. Each one offers its own dark seductive pleasure. And all embody what it’s like to live—and perhaps die—in Paradise." Read the review on our Crime Writing page.

Florida Nonfiction

Florida Sports:

Baseball Under the Palms: History of Miami Minor League Baseball, The Early Years 1892-1960, by Sam Zygner and Barbra Cabrera, "Chronicles the on-again, off-again history of baseball in Miami from its humble beginnings through 1960. A team from Cocoanut Grove traveled to Lemon City for the earliest reported amateur game in 1892," writes FBR's Bob Morison. Along the way, the book "lets you test your knowledge of the baseball lingo of today and yesteryear. The leather is, of course, a glove. Innings are stanzas, the manager is a skipper, and (new one on me) the first game of a series or double header is the lid-lifter." Learn lots more from Morison's review our Florida Sports page.

Florida History:

"As anyone who lives here can tell you, Florida suffers from one hellacious identity crisis," Nicholas Garnett writes. "Florida’s legislators, charged with managing the state’s affairs, have tried their best to impose some sense of identity upon the mayhem. The results, as Mark Lane, the author of the funny and insightful Roaring Reptiles, Bountiful Citrus, and Neon Pies, points out, have ranged from mixed to all-mixed-up."

Read Garnett's review, new on our Florida History page.

"Most will approach this book with curiosity about how wealthy people really live. (Is it really voyeuristic to be curious when consumption is this conspicuous? They want us to look.)," writes Mary Anna Evans of Les Standiford's Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, and the Rise of America's Xanadu. "Standiford deftly delivers well-researched stories of the uber-wealthy," and how they "transformed Palm Beach into something baroque, ornate, almost fevered." Read Evans' review on our Florida History page.

FBR's Victoria Calderin reviews The Corporation: An Epic Story of the Cuban American Underworld, in which, "T.J. English weaves historical accounts of the Cuban Mafia with details of the lives of those involved to recreate a vivid, dramatic world...focusing on Jose Miguel Battle Sr. and The Corporation, the criminal empire he created and ran in New Jersey, New York, and of course Florida."

Read the review on our Florida History page.

Memoir:

FBR Contibuting Editor Victoria Calderin writes of Cracker Gothic: A Florida Woman's Memoir, "Anyone who has ever cared for an ailing family member, lost a spouse, felt that tourists just don’t get their town, won free coffee for a week, knows #Floridaman, understands gator hunting to be a profitable business, or grew up looking at calendars in awe of their mysterious white winters will find a kindred spirit in Wanda Suttle Duncan."

Learn more about Green Cove Springs, FL when you read the review on our Nonfiction page.

Florida Music

"John Capouya's Florida Soul is a book on a mission to demonstrate that 'Florida’s contributions—to soul, rhythm and blues, funk, and 1970s dance-soul or disco—are equally rich, and deep' as those of Memphis, Detroit, New Orleans, and Philadelphia," writes our reviewer Bob Morison.
Learn how Capouya makes the case on our Music, Arts & Architecture page.

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 Bonnie Losak writes,"Terry Ann Thaxton is a fifth-generation Floridian, an anomaly in Florida, home to so many who have arrived here in search of an escape, some from cold winters, others from the cold reality of poverty and despair that have come to define their homelands. Her third poetry collection, Mud Song, focuses on Florida landscape and experience in a way that calls to both those who live here and those who reside elsewhere." Read the review on our Poetry page.

FBR's Miami Book Fair Blog

2020 Commemorative Miami Book Fair Poster, created by award-winning childrens' book author and illustrator Dan Santat.

FBR's team blogged the 2020 Miami Book Fair Online. Our MBF blog page gives you our bloggers' short reports on both live and pre-recorded online sessions, along with links to them. Many sessions are still available to watch in 2021!

Check out The FBR Book Fair 2020 Blog here.

More Florida Nonfiction

Bob Morison says of Hotel Scarface: Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami by Roben Farzad: "In the early 1980s, when Miami was the capital of cocaine, murder, and illicit cash flow, the Mutiny hotel and club at Sailboat Bay was the place to conduct the business of drug dealing, as well as partake of all attendant debauchery. Roben Farzad introduces the Mutiny as 'a fantasyland for outlaws in the hellscape that was Cocaine Miami' and 'a criminal free-trade zone of sorts where gangsters could both revel in Miami’s danger and escape from it.' Read the review on our Florida History page.

Reviewing Sarah Gerard's essay collection Sunshine State, Pamela Akins writes, "That she unwinds these mini-memoirs and investigative stories in our southernmost state known for its teeming life, bright light, and easy living lends them an ironic poignancy: the good life may not be all it’s cracked up to be, and there’s more than one snake in paradise." Read the review on our Nonfiction Page.

Our reviewer Victoria Calderin says that before she began reading Jeff Klinkenberg's Son of Real Florida, she worried it might be another book reinforcing "stereotypes of my zany and often mocked home state." Instead, she found "a two-hundred page serving of home." Read the review on our Nonfiction page.

"We all know that Florida is a weird place. But is the weirdness contagious? Craig Pittman thinks so and makes the case in Oh, Florida! How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country," writes our reviewer Bob Morison. "FBR features extensive coverage of Florida strangeness, but this book is the mother lode."
Read the review on our Nonfiction page.

On our Nature & Environment Page

What's a “propagule”? A "freedom lawn"? What are the facts and myths about planting a Florida garden that resists invasive species? Jonathan Louis Duckworth reviews The Art of Maintaining a Native Florida Landscape in which Ginny Stibolt "celebrates the state’s native plants and provides roadmaps for readers to honor Florida’s native ecosystem in their own gardens and landscapes." Read the review.

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

“If you knew the world were ending, and you had the chance to stop it, would you?” This is the question posed by aliens to troubled Calypso, Florida teen Henry Denton in Shaun David Hutchinson’s YA novel We are the Ants, which our reviewer, Daniel Santos, says is less about science fiction than about "a teenager struggling to survive in a world where there is little good." Read our review.

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.