A mother's latent fears rise as relentlessly as the Florida seas in a startling story of a planet, and an imagination, under pressure, by the New York Times bestselling author of Fates and Furies.
During an eco-friendly clean-up at the beach, Ange finds something horrifying in the brush. The sickening, heart-breaking evidence of an irreversibly changing earth triggers dread about the future for her daughter. But as reasoned worries slide into paranoia, reality itself begins to untether. For Ange, there may be no stepping back from the destructive darkness of her sleepless nights.
Lauren Groff's Boca Raton is part of Warmer, a collection of seven visions of a conceivable tomorrow by today's most thought-provoking authors. Alarming, inventive, intimate, and frightening, each story can be read, or listened to, in a single breath-taking sitting.
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[It was very late and Ange couldn't sleep] ***(Amazon Original Stories, 30 October 2018, ebook, 31 pages, Prime Reading)
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I enjoyed this much more than the first story in the Warmer series. Boca Raton is very bleak and hard to read at times because of this. Like, The Way the World Ends the links to climate change are almost invisible. What makes this story work is the way Groff made me really care for Ange. She's driven to the brink of paranoid madness by something many people would barely register, dead chicks, killed by swallowing plastic, presumably fed to them by their mother. This unhinges her mind and she starts to see sinister connotations everywhere. Her terror of what the future could hold and how this could affect her daughter is almost too realistic. Boca Raton is a great disturbing read.
