Through the Groves

Reviews

“This warmly evocative recollection of [Hull's] formative years will appeal to a wide audience, especially those who enjoy understated, stylishly well-told stories....a funny, candid, and authentic memoir.”
—Kirkus

“[An] entrancing coming-out and coming-of-age memoir...[Hull] paints a masterful, full-fleshed portrait of the Florida of her youth...this is a stirring account of growing up at odds with one’s environment and making it out on the other side.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Honest, tender, wistful, Through The Groves is a clear-eyed evocation of a very particular time and place and people. It’s also a gut-punch of a story about a childhood filled with uncertainty, questions, longing. This feels like the book Anne Hull has been wanting to write, needing to write, and also maybe the book she felt a little afraid to write, which are the perfect conditions for a heart-rending memoir. I’ve long admired Hull as a journalist, but I turned the last page feeling she was a friend.”
—J. R. Moehringer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Tender Bar

“Stunningly beautiful. A spellbinding trek into a long-lost Florida and a girlhood whose heroine you will never forget.”
—Andrea Elliott, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Invisible Child

“Anne Hull stole my heart in chapter one with her childhood stories of driving long miles through dusty orchards while building the quiet confidence born of helping dad at his job. By the end of Through the Groves, she had given it back to me, fuller and wiser, and with a new gratitude for the ‘orange people’ who provide the sweetness to our mornings.”
—Hope Jahren, author of Lab Girl and The Story of More

“Anne Hull's memoir takes the reader on a rattletrap, strangely private, exquisitely moving ride. Hull can remind one of Welty at times, both in her humor (subtle, wild, forgiving) and her disarmingly skillful prose. Yet Hull is zanier and sexier than Welty, and there is also an erotic coming- of-age story discreetly embedded in this book.”
—Terry Castle, author of The Professor and Other Writings

“Anne Hull has written some of the most important stories of our time, beautifully, unflinchingly. We should not be surprised that in her memoir, as she turns her pen toward her own heart, own ghosts, it would be beautiful, too. A memoir is supposed to be brave, and it is, but this is more than that. Here, we learn that an orange grove can contain all the terror and all the beauty in the world, and that the trees will cut you up, inside an out. As she tells her own story she tells a tale of old Florida, all but extinct by now, a place where you can trust an orange grower but never a tomato man, and the mermaids, made from department store mannequins, still call to you, somehow, across miles of dust and grit and pesticide. It is, ultimately, a story of breaking free, only to see, as all of us do, that there is no such thing.”
—Rick Bragg, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of All Over But the Shoutin'

“Anne Hull writes with detail so evocative, unsentimental, and deliciously funny that to read her is an uncommon joy. There is a gift on every page of Through the Groves, a memoir that shows the world what many of us in the newspaper world have long known. Anne's a wonder, one of a kind.”
—David Maraniss, author of Path Lit By Lightning