Customer Reviews

All the Women in Florida

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Alex Paozols's first novel, |All the Women in Florida|, is an anatomy of dislocation and clinging. It is a geography of family that traces the trenches and hills of desensitization and love, of anaesthesia and clarity. Stylisitically it is quick, energetic, subtle. Its style deftly mirrors the internal status of loss and despondency; the solace of alcohol; the persistence of hope; the possibility of serenity. The characters are all first names, and the hurricanes are first names also. The names of people and hurricanes are crossed in mutually violent acts of creation and destruction. Alcohol, too, is a hurricane. The storyteller is Ross, who, with his extended family, exerts a seemingly timeless presence in the small towns in central Florida. Many demonstrate an inevitable reluctance to change, and everyone in his family is "an alcoholic in one way or another," including himself. His efforts to abstain suggest a futile attempt to hold himself together in the face of a family torn by race, prejudice, foolery, and knavishness, yet clinging to one another like the sediment of long history. Ross characterizes his dependence on booze and nicotine as "pressing meaning into substances," a tendency either to be shunned or monitored with regard to the substances in question. It is substance that he craves, and it is substance that he is in his acceptance of his brother Robert's sexual proclivities, his cousin Johnny Ray's knavery, and his cousin Monica's interracial union. Amidst the family differences, Monica says of Ross, "You're the only one who can safely go back and forth. I know some of them still think I'm the original sin." These lives in rural Florida are a microcosm of existence; the booze and the hurricanes are divine judgment and divine solace. Words like pain and loneliness only take meaning beside words like understanding and hope. And though reality rarely offers a happy ending, in this book, as with reality, there will always be survivors. Life itself--as one could read in the AA handbook as well as in |Paradise Lost|--is an exercise in patient endurance: "An orange has to ripen for about 300 days 'on the vine' and in the sun. It can not be picked early and allowed to ripen in some dark bin." This extends to humanity as a sort of hopeful passivity--a necessary, but by no means sufficient, attribute in the creation and maintenance of the persisting substance.

Sean Ford, Instructor, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

This book is a great example of how descriptive writing and life-like characters can pull you into the book and make you feel that it is real. The book leaves you wanting more information on the characters and their lives. In all, a great book, four stars.

For his first book, Paozols really did a good job. It was a nice novella to read. It wasn't too deep. There were times, however, I lost track of where he was going, but in the end, it really picked up and finished well. Overall, a very pleasing book to read.

AT FIRST GLANCE I WAS A LITTLE LOST, ALTHOUGH ONCE I REALIZED WHERE ROSS WAS COMING FROM, I FELT AS IF I WAS SITTING IN HIS KITCHEN AND HE WAS SPEAKING TO ME PERSONALLY. ROSS'S TRIALS THROUGH HIS FAMILY, AND HIS STRUGGLES OF DRINKING AND SMOKING MAKES YOU WANT TO SHARE HIS TRAIL AND REJOICE IN HIS VICTORY. VERY EASY READING AND A GREAT TRIUMP FOR ALEX. MAY YOUR NEXT NOVEL SHINE AS BRIGHT.