Through the Groves: Growing Up in a Florida That No Longer Exists
Before Disney bulldozed its way into Central Florida, the heart of the state belonged to citrus. Anne Hull grew up in the middle of it.
In Through the Groves, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist Hull takes us back to her childhood in Sebring, a small town on the Florida Ridge where her family had worked the orange groves for generations. As a girl, she rode shotgun with her father, a fruit buyer for a juice processing company, as he drove through miles of remote groves armed with a pistol and a rattlesnake bite kit. At home, she was pulled between her idealistic but self-destructive father and her glamorous Brooklyn-born mother who never quite fit the rural Florida mold.
Hull captures a version of Florida most people never knew existed: muggy, sun-beaten, and fragrant with citrus blossoms, a world where the ground was starting to shake from bulldozers clearing land for a place called Walt Disney World. It’s a warm, funny, and candid coming-of-age story about growing up at odds with your surroundings and finding a way out.
