THROUGH THE GROVES: A MEMOIR
ANNE HULL
© 2023 Henry Holt
$26.99
224 pages

She still recalls the smell and the heat and the pesticides.

Anne Hull was her daddy's sidekick the summer she was six years old, riding along with him on his job as a fruit buyer in the middle of Florida, where rows of orange trees stretched for miles. Together, they visited the dusty, scarred older Black men who worked the groves on her father's route, and he taught her all about "withholding confidential information" and not telling her mother about using a chalky field as a bathroom or about the gun in his car.

Hull's mother already knew about the roadside stops he made, and the bars along his way home. The ride-alongs Hull so enjoyed were meant to deter her father from "Friday afternoon fever" and bright neon beer signs.

Back then, Hull was only starting to notice that her family moved often, from one ramshackle house to another, and she saw the weekly checks her great-grandmother gave her father. She already knew that adults kept secrets that weren't so secret to a growing girl who was obsessed with being a spy someday. These were adventures, just like the ones she had with cousins and her little brother, who was an accident-prone "calamity."

When Hull's mother left and moved in with her own mother, that was an adventure, too — until it wasn't. Hull had became old enough to understand genteel poverty and that hand-me-downs weren't cool. She bonded with her grandmother over music; sneered at her mother, as teenagers do; and thought about her dad, but only in the abstract.

He never forgot about her, though.

He never stopped trying to be her father.

Rather than opening this tale where most childhood memoirs start, with eye-rolling, attitudinal teen years, Hull's solid and sincere story begins the summer she was six years old. This gives readers the gift of an observant kid's-eye view of life — one who is older than her years and doesn't miss a thing, but is not insufferably precious or precocious. Viewed through the lens of a grown-up, then, those early memories give readers the "more" they crave, becoming a triple-whammy of coming-of-age, coming out, and coming to terms with the frailty of family. That's sharp as flint but also hilarious.

Hull says her father was a storyteller, and this apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Start Through the Groves and you'll find that you just can't leaf it.