Sanibel holiday

Toddlers often squeal upon first seeing the ocean, jumping up and down as the tide tickles their toes. Older kids charge forward into the waves with a whoop. But every now and then, a little girl stands on the shoreline with arms outstretched, as if to embrace the sweep of sky and water. Her  expression is one of [...]

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Swim with the gators!

Back in the early 1930s, a white Ohio timber mill worker bought — sight unseen –  what he thought was prime Florida farmland. Sure enough, his Everglades parcel ”turned out to be covered with six feet of crystal water. Stalks of nine-foot saw grass glittered in the wind, in every direction, the drowned sentinels of an eternal slough.” But Grandpa [...]

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Zora, girl detective

Who knew? Years before Nancy Drew ever cracked a case, Zora Neale Hurston was solving mysteries in early 20th-century Eatonville, Florida. At least that’s the way writers Victoria Bond and T.R. Simon have imagined it in their engaging new novel for middle-graders, Zora and Me, narrated by Zora’s best friend, Carrie Brown. The summer before fourth [...]

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Off the road

Unlike Carl Hiaasen, who uses Day-Glo colors in his almost-black comedies of Florida, John Brandon goes for the dark side of the palette in his second novel, Citrus County. This disquieting tale of adolescent crimes of the heart and worse plays out in a off-the-road, middle-of-nowhere world of muddy browns and greens, mosquitoes, mushrooms and mildew.  This is [...]

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Skink and skank

I fully expect Clinton Tyree to garner a number of write-in votes in the upcoming Florida gubernatorial election. Or some may just scribble ”Skink,” the name the former governor of the Sunshine State goes by these days in Carl Hiaasen’s wild and crazy novels. Ever since Tallahassee politics drove him off the deep-end, Skink has been hiding in [...]

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