Deb Rogers’s debut novel Florida Woman follows Jamie Hawthorne, a young waitress who receives the “Florida woman” title after appearing in a video committing a Benny-Hill-style crime against her employer involving, among other things, a pelican. To avoid jail time, she takes up a community service opportunity at Atlas: a central Florida wildlife refuge run by a group of mysterious women with radical beliefs about the land they live on, the herpes-infected monkeys that inhabit it, and the value of human life. The longer Jamie stays at Atlas, the more transfixed she becomes on the women, their ideas, and the monkeys. That is, until the dark secrets she uncovers shatter her faith and endanger her life.
Tiger King clearly inspired the book. His majesty was even so kind as to put a blurb on the back. But Jamie’s voice is definitely not Joe Exotic’s, the preeminent pop culture antihero, whose many sins were no match for his charisma, at least in the public imagination. Instead, her voice could be anyone’s. Jamie is an everywoman. Relatively unsophisticated but capable, a follower, a people-pleaser. These characteristics serve the plot well, because they make her an ideal cult victim — a good girl too desperate for approval to question the bizarre behavior and events surrounding her.
Unfortunately, the story is told from Jamie’s perspective in the first person. Nowadays, too many books are written in the first person that shouldn’t be, a disastrous consequence of the late 2000s-2010s’ YA boom. With so much of today’s aspiring beach lit modeled on the megahits from that boom, its sounds have made their way into places where they don’t resonate. Yes, Twilight’s protagonist Bella Swan was an everygirl, a chronically underdeveloped and boring character with no personality outside of her relationships, something that enraged feminists but created two standing armies of teenage girls in Team Jacob and Team Edward T-shirts who wanted nothing more than to Buffalo Bill their way into Bella’s hollow literary skinsuit and live out their beastly romance fantasies with either a vampire or a werewolf. But this book is not written for teenage girls, who frankly can identify more keenly than any other segment of the reading population with an empty mind. Even if it were, they wouldn’t want to project themselves onto Jamie, because her deepest relationship in the book is with a diseased monkey.
Fiction written in the first person only works well when the narrator has a unique voice — acidic, deranged, poignant, precise, funny. Jamie’s voice has none of these qualities. She is tedious and meek, two things a narrator should never be. She also tends not to ask obvious questions about Atlas’s strange policies or people continuously brought up in conversation among the caretakers. This preserves the suspense, but it leaves the reader frustrated with the narrator. A third-person perspective would have much better served the book.
Rogers has a talent for setting. Atlas and all the nature surrounding it are beautifully detailed. Jamie’s recounting of her pre-Atlas struggles, both a dysfunctional childhood and the stress of juggling a series of low-wage, tourist-oriented service jobs, actually reflects the realities of Florida’s working class. The ambient and mundane financial anxieties that pervade the country’s largest social class are hardly ever explored in novels, and Rogers’s handling of them is commendable. When Jamie wonders how long it will take her to re-accumulate a complete set of essential household furniture after leaving Atlas, she becomes more human, more real. The day-to-day lives of women who run the wildlife shelter and the environment they create, both physical and otherwise, is a subtle but brilliant parody of lesbian culture, particularly the granola, cottage-core type, which is often acknowledged but rarely explored. However, despite Atlas’s obvious sapphic undertones and the overt lesbianism of Jamie and another Atlas resident, Tierra, there is no sex in the book of any kind. There is also a near to complete absence of curse words. Both of these things give the book a sanitized, network television feel. But why? What adult audience that has chosen to read a book dealing with multiple murders, homosexuality, drug trafficking, and ritual sacrifice would be scandalized by naughty words?
The plot leaves some mysterious threads that need to be sewn up, and themes Rogers too often dances around are worth exploring. Despite the amateurism, it is obvious that she has something to say if only she would spit it out. When she does, as when she parodies the lesbian hippies, or when she describes Jamie’s woes as a service worker, the book says something we actually might be surprised by and bother being engaged with. The same goes for the eco-pessimism of the Atlas women, whose ideas are more Ted Kaczynski than Greta Thunberg. Their Malthusian beliefs are incongruent with their own history — the book mentions on several occasions that before opening the monkey reserve, they owned and operated a midwife training center on the same land.
A major moment in the plot comes as it is revealed exactly what crime landed Jamie at Atlas. After her shift ends at Tiki Hut, a tourist trap restaurant where they staple dollar bills to the wall, Jamie has a few drinks with two of her co-workers, and they all decide to steal some money off the walls. As she does so, a pelican waltzes through the back door. The pelican knocks over three hurricane candles, setting the Tiki Hut on fire. She scoops up the pelican and runs outside, then stands with the pelican in the parking lot as the restaurant burns. The entire event was recorded on a security camera. When it’s published online, Jamie goes viral.
Yet the 15 viral minutes of fame and the incentives that come with seem to strike the precariously placed Jamie with little temptation. Humiliating yourself on the internet is one of the last remaining avenues to the middle class, and Jamie doesn’t seem interested at all. No reality TV deal? No OnlyFans? No YouTube channel? No sham megachurch religious conversion? No podcast? No Substack? No incoherent political campaign? No GoFundMe? Frankly, it reads as unmotivated, uppity, almost un-American. Jamie is not a Northeastern graphic designer or, worse, a Canadian. She is a waitress from central Florida. There’s no reason this woman shouldn’t have at least sold a T-shirt. A little cynicism, please. Adding a bit of edge to Jamie’s character would have rendered a much more real-feeling human being.
There are moments of brilliance in the book. Chapters are sometimes intercut by shared Google docs from the Atlas staff, in which they squabble about the precise language on the site, “consensus making,” and other things that parody activist-type organizations quite well and uniquely. Sometimes, the docs even help move the plot along.
The book also contains the most concise theory of Florida I’ve ever read. It made me root for Rogers as a writer, even when I felt indifferent to the character she created. It reads, in part: “People flood to Florida because it is the end of the country, the end of the line, the last stop, the last call, last chance to start again.” If I hadn’t read that, I would have said, “Florida Woman is a solid crack at a mystery novel, and I recommend it for diverting summer beach reading.” It is, and I do. But because of that paragraph, I know Rogers could have written something better than a beach novel. I just wish she had.
River Page is a writer and essayist. Find his Substack, Chain Smoking to Babylon.
