Author: Anne Hull
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
Release Date: June 1, 2023
*I received a free electronic copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
I loved this book! I found it difficult to put down. Anne Hull is an amazing writer. The reader is immediately transmitted to 1960s central Florida- to a place known as The Ridge. Life surrounds the orange groves that cover that part of the state. Her father, a former pesticide salesman, now in the orange juice business, takes Anne with him on his route. (This was her teacher-mother's idea, in order to make sure her dad didn't wind up drinking or in places he should not have been.)
We meet Hull's family in all their eccentric glory. Her father grew up on The Ridge in a family of orange growers. Her mother had come from up north with her own mother- a woman who spoke in a foreign accent although she was American. There is also her easy-going brother Dwight, whose name the family decides to change to Jim later in the story.
As her coming-of-age story unwinds, Hull takes us back to the 1960s and early 1970s: The Jackson Five, bell bottoms, shopping malls, Tiger Beat Magazine. Her family often struggled financially as they moved around central Florida following her mother's teaching jobs and her father's life in the Groves.
As Hull moves through her teen years, she begins to come to terms with her homosexuality, eventually realizing that she would eventually have to leave the Groves in order to live her life as she chose.
This is a moving memoir that took me back to my own years in the south in the 1970s. I highly recommend it.
Read this book if...
...you love biographies and memoirs
...you love stories from the southern states
...you enjoy coming-of-age stories
... you enjoy stories about family
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