Florida

"Set in the Midwest, where Florida represents a faraway paradise, this elegiac and luminous novel tells the story of Alice Fivey. Her father long gone and her mother -- whose toenails winked in the foil bed we knew for Florida -- newly institutionalized. Alice is left in the care of relatives at age ten. While others try to mold her into someone different from her mother, she consoles herself with books and becomes a storyteller herself until, moving into adulthood, she finds the meaning of her own experience."--page 4 of cover.