Florida is presented as a place of oppressive remoteness that gradually becomes a home. Mack arrives there through witness protection after her testimony helps put a drug lord in prison, expecting a temporary assignment caring for eccentric billionaire Oliver Bishop’s exotic animals. Instead, Florida confines her in an isolated mansion with no cell service, exposes her to Oliver’s concealed nonhuman identity, and ultimately gives her the land and independence needed to establish the animal rescue shelter she had long wanted.

Setting and First Impressions

Florida initially appears almost uninhabitable to Mack. She comes from a semi-arid desert environment shaped by subtle greens and browns, whereas Florida is described as relentlessly green, wet, and humid. The heat makes the air feel clogged, like a sauna, even inside a United States Marshals Service van with its air conditioning running. Her discomfort is physical and immediate: she expects that she will be forced to wear shorts despite her self-consciousness about her thighs and calves, and she feels overwhelmed before reaching the destination.

The journey intensifies the sense that Florida lies beyond ordinary society. For nearly an hour, the vehicle travels without encountering a road sign or another vehicle. Giant-leaved trees lean over the paved road, the forest blocks the sun, and the dense vegetation makes the area seem capable of hiding an entire criminal force without anyone noticing. The landscape therefore functions as more than scenery. It is a natural barrier that cuts Mack off from the world while also shielding the people and secrets hidden within it.

The Isolated Mansion

Mack does not recognize her arrival because the temporary home has no visible yard, driveway, or ordinary sign of habitation. Trees and brush surround the property so completely that the house is concealed until she steps from the vehicle into the sticky heat. What first seems absent is replaced by excess: the building is not a modest house but a mansion, nearly a palace, with a flat roof towering above the surrounding trees and extending for several meters in every direction. Its mottled green exterior is designed to blend into the environment while remaining sturdy and well maintained.

The mansion’s isolation is deliberate. Oliver Bishop built it in the middle of a swamp to keep people away, and its remoteness is reinforced by the lack of reliable transportation. Oliver has no vehicles. A helicopter can be summoned, but messages may take as long as a week to reach it, leaving the road as the only dependable route back to civilization. The property thus creates a double condition for Mack: it is a sanctuary from the drug lord’s men, but it is also a place from which escape cannot be assumed.

Florida as Refuge and Threat

The Florida setting makes Mack’s witness protection feel like a form of enforced exile. She is sent away from her former life and told that the arrangement is temporary, yet the absence of communication and transportation gives the placement a troubling permanence. The mansion protects her by making her difficult to find, but the same landscape limits her choices. Florida’s wilderness becomes an instrument of both safety and captivity, and the tension between those meanings drives the early relationship between Mack and Oliver.

The threat eventually becomes explicit when Oliver prepares the property for battle rather than treating the swamp as a place in which to hide. He insists that he knows the terrain and will protect Mack, while explaining that fighting, not concealment, belongs to his gorilla nature. Florida therefore becomes the ground on which Oliver’s hidden identity is revealed and tested. Its distance from civilization makes the confrontation possible, while its dense vegetation and fortified isolation provide the conditions for resistance against the drug lord’s pursuit.

Transformation into Home

Florida’s meaning changes after Mack’s life with Oliver takes root. In the epilogue, she no longer treats the state’s heat and humidity as enemies. She abandons the clothing intended to hide her body and embraces tank tops and short shorts, wearing even less when she and Oliver are at their countryside getaway. The change is not merely sartorial. It marks her movement from guarded discomfort to physical ease and from imposed displacement to chosen belonging.

That belonging is tied to work with animals. Oliver purchases several acres just outside Orlando so Mack can establish the animal rescue shelter she had been trying to create before witness protection interrupted her plans. At first the shelter is licensed only for domestic animals, while Mack works toward registration to care for wild animals. She is shown weighing squirming kittens and returning them to their mother, whose licking confirms the scene’s domestic tenderness. Florida has become the place where Mack’s professional knowledge, compassion, and independence can coexist.

Narrative Significance

Florida embodies the book’s unstable boundary between human civilization and animal life. The state’s swamp, heat, and dense forest place Mack outside familiar social structures, while Oliver’s mansion conceals a man who is also a gorilla. The setting therefore supports a posthuman reversal: Mack travels there to care for exotic animals but discovers that the supposedly absent animal is Oliver himself. His nonhuman nature is not treated only as a threat; it becomes part of the protective household and eventually part of the life Mack chooses.

The location also gives concrete form to the contrast between institutional protection and self-determined safety. Witness protection relocates Mack without giving her real control over where she lives or how she communicates. Florida first intensifies that dependency, but the later countryside property near Orlando reverses it. Through Oliver’s resources and Mack’s labor, the isolated refuge becomes a functioning rescue center and a shared home. Florida’s decisive narrative role is therefore transformational: it begins as a suffocating place of heat, silence, and confinement and ends as the landscape in which Mack can live openly, care for animals, and build a future.