I didn't love this book and can't even point to anything that I liked a lot, but reading it made me want to write. A book hasn't made me feel that in a while, so four stars! ( )

5/5 ( )

I picked up this book of essays because it appeared on a lot of "Best of" lists and because I thought it would help me figure out my new state. And it turns out that the author was raised and lived in basically the next town over from where I am, so there are lots of references to places I am becoming familiar with. However, despite its title, this is not really a book about Florida. Instead, its more of a memoir, the story of a i've, with essays attached, not a tour guide of Florida. Like many books of essays, some are good, some not so good. I will just briefly describe each:

"BFF" This is the story of an on-again/off-again troubled friendship written in a breathless stream of consciousness style. I spent the rest of the book trying to figure out who BFF is.

"Mother-Father God" Her parents were for a long while extremely active in and leaders of an offshoot of the Christian Science church. There's a great deal of church history here, as well as the story of her parents and their backgrounds. Also musings on how religion affected her after she was grown up.

"Going Diamond" Her parents were also for a long while highly involved with Amway. There's a lot about the history of Amway and its founders. She uses the experiences of her family to ponder the American dream of upward mobility. Interspersed are "stories" (not sure if they are real or made-up) of her and her husband visiting with a real estate agent, with no intention of buying, progressively larger and more luxurious mansions. Quote: "For my part, I'm now skeptical of my materialistic impulses. The dreams I built in Amway don't appeal to me anymore."

"Records" Her life as a teenager at an arts magnet school. Lots of drugs and partying. Quote: "My journal entries are sprawling and emotionally wrought."

"The Mayor of Williams Park" This is an essay about homelessness, and the criminalization of poverty. In 2009, St. Petersburg was named the second meanest city in the US because of its many ordinances criminalizing homelessness.

"Sunshine State" The Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary on Gulf Boulevard on the Pinellas County barrier islands is right down the street from me, and it (and its founder) have quite a story, all told in this fascinating essay. "At its height over a hundred thousand individuals and ten thousand birds entered the sanctuary's grounds every year, making it the largest nonprofit wild bird hospital in the country." But all is not well in Bird Paradise.

"Rabbit" Back to memoir again, with the story of her grandparents.

"Before: An Inventory" "written on the occasion of turning 30.". This experimental piece consists simply of lists of animals she comes across, beginning in June, "Botanical Gardens bees on the roses, white dog at the in-laws, roaches in my apartment--Brooklyn, goldfish at my parents' house--Largo, cats pissing in the laundry, lizards on the porch, jays in the roses, Sunken Gardens kookaburra, cockatoo, flamingo, stray dogs on the freeway off-ramp." And on and on for many, many more pages.

3 stars ( )

In reality - the first essay was 5 stars - the next 3 I read more like 2.5 to 3.
173 pages read of however many pages, I am finished. The first essay was truly incredible - I couldn't wait to read more. Until I did. I knew I was in trouble when I started skimming over the facts of Christian Science while the more personal parts kept me going. Then the Amway piece where it felt like my blood was literally boiling over anger towards DeVos and that ilk. Then trudging through Records for fragments of interesting bits for a mediocre end. I quit. Too many great books out there I can't wait to read. ( )

Sunshine State, Gerard’s follow-up to her debut novel, Binary Star, is an impressive, albeit uneven collection of writing. Though the book initially purports to be nonfiction, there are enough cautions scattered throughout to make us question that status, perhaps most notably the beginning of the piece “Sunshine State,” where Gerard states, “Characters in the following story are presenting their own versions of events and do not necessarily reflect the truth, which we may never know.” While these recurring cautions may leave you to question the book’s relationship with the truth, they’re not enough to keep you from continuing a generally engaging collection.

Conscious as we are of Gerard’s talent and the resulting successes, it would be wrong to suggest this collection is without flaws. In addition to Sunshine State’s slipperiness in coming down on one side of the fiction/nonfiction divide, the final piece feels throwaway, disconnected from the rest of the book, its use of italicization drawing attention to what seemed to me a lack of real, fully-considered content. More even, the book’s dizzying reliance on footnotes was just too much for this sort of non-scholarly work.

All that said, in Sunshine State’s best work—the opening essay, “BFF”, the title piece, and its follow-on, “Rabbit”—Gerard effortlessly covers vast amounts of emotional and intellectual terrain, doing so in a voice that’s smart and powerful overall, streetwise when necessary. Truly, few writers can manage to be this profound without becoming self-conscious or this affective without becoming overwrought. To accomplish both, with this much style, is indeed rare. Perhaps it’s just that Gerard sets such a high standard with her hits, that her misses are made even more obvious.

From The Nervous Breakdown's Review Microbrew, Volume 7 ( )