Anne Hull grew up in rural Central Florida, pulled between her idealistic but self-destructive father and her mother, a glamorous outsider from Brooklyn struggling with her own aspirations. All the while, Hull felt the pressures of girlhood closing in. As her sexual identity took shape, Hull knew the place she loved would never love her back and began plotting her escape.
Able to spin memories into literary gold, Hull’s warmth and sadness call to mind the grotesqueries of Flannery O’Connor ... Through the Groves hits that perfect place between pain and love, and Hull makes it look easy.
Through the Groves isn’t just another lament about a ruined paradise. Hull’s time-stamp of Florida is the muggy, buggy, sun-beaten setting for a girl struggling first for a social toehold, then for a way out ... She has that sly eye for sublime details, but also a killer instinct for tight storytelling ... The topic of her sexuality runs somewhat lightly throughout, and I wish she would have spent more time dealing with the experience of coming out when and where she did.
With all due respect to Hull's personal story, Through the Groves is an evocative memoir not so much because of the freshness of its plot, but because Hull is such a discerning reporter of her own past. She fills page after page here with the kind of small, charged and often wry details that make a lost world come alive.
