Our host for this month is Janet Shellenberger.

Our book is "Through the Groves: A Memoir," by Anne Hull.

This is an engaging coming-of-age memoir set in the Florida orange groves of the 1960s, written by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Anne Hull who grew up in rural Central Florida. She was barefoot half the time and ran through the orange groves her father’s family had worked for generations. The ground trembled from the vibrations of bulldozers and jackhammers clearing land for Walt Disney World. “Look now, it will all soon be gone.” her father told her. But the real threat was at home, where Hull was 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. She dreamed of becoming a traveling salesman who ate in motel coffee shops, accompanied by her baton-twirling babysitter. As her sexual identity took shape, Hull knew the place she loved would never love her back and began plotting her escape.

Hull captures it all—the smells and sounds of a disappearing way of life, the secret rituals and rhythms of a doomed family, the casual racism of the rural South in the 1960s, and the suffocating expectations placed on girls and women.

Note: The book is available through the Pinellas Public Library Cooperative at multiple branches; Libby has a audiobook version. Sharon Grimshaw and Pat Higgins have copies of the book to loan if the book isn't available at the library.