State of Paradise

Dreamy and surreal, this hybrid of autofiction and speculative fiction is set in the wake of a pandemic (but not our pandemic) and features a Florida ghostwriter grappling to make sense of the world as it is now, her troubling personal relationships, and the increasing pull a VR program called ELECTRA has on some community members and her own sister. This short novel is more than a little bit weird and had me constantly thinking of Lauren Groff's short story collection Florida for its similar mood and setting. I happened to read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar just before picking up this book and that turned out to be fortuitous timing.