Florida by Lauren Groff     {Reviewed by STELLA} Lauren Groff’s collection of short stories explores the storm within and the storm without. Brooding, edgy and bruised, the landscape (and its people) in Groff’s words is ‘an Eden of dangerous things’. We encounter alligators waiting at the water’s edge, snakes coiled ready to strike and panthers slinking through the suburban landscape - a landscape at the edge of wilderness - nature never far from creating chaos in the domestic worlds of the characters. The protagonists are the voices of women: women alone, with children (alone); with others yet in solitude. The setting is, as the title of the collection suggests, Florida: swamps, heat, moisture and menacing skies announcing coming storms. Physical hurricanes tear through landscapes and homes while, emotional storms bring revelation and discomfort. In 'Eyewall' a woman confronts the ghosts of her cheating husband, her first love suicided and her father eaten by cancer, while drinking wine in the bathtub - the last sanctuary in the storm that leaves her house standing but devastated. In 'The Midnight Zone', the mother of two young boys falls while changing the light bulb at a remote holiday home. Concussed, she lies on the floor while her children gather to her, bring food and water, awaiting the return of their father as a storm rages around them and a panther, real or metaphysical, prowls outside. In 'Salvador', a middle-aged woman, seemingly in control of her life, is having her monthly holiday in Brazil when she is caught out by a storm which leaves her locked in a small space with an unsavoury local grocer. She realises her vulnerability and feels shockingly alone as she reflects on her life as a carer for her ailing mother in Florida. From the first story in this collection, Groff places the reader in the eyes of observers. A mother walks the street at night to find freedom from the domestic bliss/pressure of small children. A grad student gives up her teaching tenure to live in her station wagon, eventually becoming isolated and part of a growing underclass. Two girls are left abandoned in a beach hut to fend for themselves, waiting for the ‘lady’ who will look after them. Groff takes us to the edges of our civilised worlds and throws us to the wolves - or, as this is Florida - the alligators and panthers who lurk in the gloom. Dark and edgy, these stories are Groff yelling at us to wake up and to push back against the society we accept and sleepwalk through, to see the waste, the fallacy, the degradation of our environment and our emotional shallowness. With clever writing, evocative and carefully calibrated, Lauren Groff has verve and these stories, with their connected themes and sense of place, will sharpen your outlook.