Join us for a night of fruit and Florida felony with Florida writers. Annabelle Tometich will be in conversation with Rebecca Renner, author of recent release Gator Country on April 12th at 6pm at the store. Tometich will be speaking on her new book, The Mango Tree, a memoir about growing up Filipina in Florida and the messiness of family. Copies of both books will be available for purchase and signing.
There's parking in our shopping plaza and street parking around the neighborhood.
About the book:
Rows of orange people sit handcuffed in a beige room. One of them is my mother.
When journalist Annabelle Tometich picks up the phone one June morning, she isn't expecting a collect call from an inmate at the Lee County Jail. And when she accepts, she certainly isn't prepared to hear her mother's voice on the other end of the line. However, explaining the situation to her younger siblings afterwards was easy; all she had to say was, "Mom shot at some guy. He was messing with her mangoes." They immediately understood. Answering the questions of the breaking-news reporter—at the same newspaper where Annabelle worked as a restaurant critic—proved more difficult. Annabelle decided to go with a variation of the truth: It was complicated.
So begins The Mango Tree, a poignant and deceptively entertaining memoir of growing up as a mixed-race Filipina "nobody" in suburban Florida as Annabelle traces the roots of her upbringing—all the while reckoning with her erratic father's untimely death in a Fort Myers motel room, her fiery mother's bitter yearning for the country she left behind, and her own journey in the pursuit of belonging.
With clear-eyed compassion and piercing honesty, The Mango Tree is a family saga that navigates the tangled branches of Annabelle's life, from her childhood days in an overflowing house flooded by balikbayan boxes, vegetation, and juicy mangoes, to her winding path from medical-school hopeful to restaurant critic. It is a love letter to her fellow Filipino Americans, her lost younger self, and the beloved fruit tree at the heart of her family. But above all, it is an ode to Annabelle's hot-blooded, whip-smart mother, Josefina, a woman who made a life and a home of her own, and without whom Annabelle would not have herself.
About Annabelle:
Annabelle Tometich went from medical-school reject to line cook to journalist to author. She spent eighteen years as a food writer, editor, and restaurant critic for The News-Press in her hometown of Fort Myers, Florida. Her first book, “The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony” will be published April 2, 2024 by Little, Brown.
Tometich’s writing has appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today, Catapult, the Tampa Bay Times, and many more outlets. She has won more than a dozen awards for her stories, including first place for Food & Travel Writing at the 2022 Sunshine State Awards. She (still) lives in Fort Myers with her husband, two children, and her ever-fiery Filipina mother
About Rebecca:
Rebecca Renner is an author and National Geographic contributor from Daytona Beach, Florida. Her other writing has appeared in The New York Times, Outside Magazine, Tin House, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other publications. She holds an MFA from Stetson University. She is the 2024 winner of the Florida Book Awards’ Gerald Ensley Developing Writer Award. Gator Country is her debut. She lives in Orlando, Florida with the two cats the universe sent to keep her in line.
Gator Country has garnered rave reviews from the New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, Scientific American, Tampa Bay Times, Christian Science Monitor, Sierra Magazine, BookPage, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, and more. It was a New York Times Editors' Choice, a People Magazine Book of the Week. Many publications and platforms—as wide-ranging as BookPage, Amazon, and the Chicago Public Library—included Gator Country in their best of 2023 books list.
