Anne Hull grew up in central Florida, barefoot half the time and running around the orange groves where her father worked as a fruit buyer and “flocks of white birds lifted from the backs of cattle, disturbed by the jackhammers and bulldozers clearing land for Walt Disney World”. Anne's funny, 500-watts of charm mother taught fourth grade, her grandparents owned orange groves and an iconic farm stand of their own, and her little brother tagged along in envy of his big sister.
Vividly atmospheric and stirring, Through the Groves is an honest and clear-eyed look at all the grit and magic of one very memorable childhood, but also an exploration of a brutal, sometimes wonderfully strange and ever-changing place. The summer Hull turns seven, we watch the citrus wilderness she calls home dissolve into corporate expansions, just as her family and sense of self were coming apart, too. Her father's alcoholism finally implodes her parents' marriage, and her mother, a wit and lover of culture, makes do with the little the family has without him.
As she grows into adolescence, Hull has a nascent sense, a fear, that she might be a lesbian, an identity that clashes wildly with the narrow confines of womanhood in the only place she's ever known. By the time she began college, Anne was on the brink of a meltdown. She dropped out of Florida State, sold beauty products for Revlon in Ft. Lauderdale, and, finally, fled north. She intended to never return to the orchards. Until a writing assignment decades later for The New Yorker took her home and forced her to reckon with the place and the people she came from.
A story about outgrowing the place you're from and returning home to it with new eyes in adulthood, Through the Groves is also the story of Hull's journey out of the groves and into a life of her own.
