Rating: *****
Tags: Fiction, General, San Francisco (Calif.), Young women, Contemporary, Literary, Psychological, Romance, Sagas, Love Stories, Young Adult, Adult, Florists, Flower Language, Lang:en
Summary
A mesmerizing, moving, and elegantly written debut novel,
The Language of Flowers beautifully weaves past and
present, creating a vivid portrait of an unforgettable woman
whose gift for flowers helps her change the lives of others
even as she struggles to overcome her own troubled past.
The Victorian language of flowers was used to convey
romantic expressions: honeysuckle for devotion, asters for
patience, and red roses for love. But for Victoria Jones,
it’s been more useful in communicating grief, mistrust,
and solitude. After a childhood spent in the foster-care
system, she is unable to get close to anybody, and her only
connection to the world is through flowers and their meanings.
Now eighteen and emancipated from the system, Victoria has
nowhere to go and sleeps in a public park, where she plants a
small garden of her own. Soon a local florist discovers her
talents, and Victoria realizes she has a gift for helping
others through the flowers she chooses for them. But a
mysterious vendor at the flower market has her questioning
what’s been missing in her life, and when she’s
forced to confront a painful secret from her past, she must
decide whether it’s worth risking everything for a second
chance at happiness.
Amazon Exclusive: Paula McLain Reviews *The Language of
Flowers*
Paula McLain is the
New York Times best-selling author of
The Paris Wife. She grew up in Fresno, California
where, after being abandoned by both parents, she spent
fourteen years in the foster care system. A graduate of the
MFA program at The University of Michigan, she has taught
literature and creative writing for many years, and currently
lives with her children in Cleveland, Ohio.
I feel it's only fair to warn you, dear reader, that Vanessa
Diffenbaugh's central character, Victoria Jones, is going to
break your heart three ways from Sunday. She's also going to
make you want to pick her up, shake her and scream,
why can’t you let yourself be happy? But for
Victoria, the answer is as complex as the question is simple.
She's spent her childhood ricocheting through countless foster
and group homes, and the experience has left her in pieces.
Painfully isolated and deeply mistrustful, she cares only about
flowers and their meanings. She herself is like a thistle, a
wall of hard-earned thorns. When we first encounter Victoria, it's the day of her
emancipation from foster care, her eighteenth birthday.
"Emancipation" couldn't be a more ironic word for this moment.
For Victoria, as for most foster care survivors—-myself
included—-freedom really means
free fall. She has nowhere to go, no resources, no one
who cares about her. She ends up sleeping in a public park,
tending a garden of pilfered blossoms, and living on her wits.
It's only when a local florist sees Victoria's special way with
flowers that she is given a means to survive. But survival is
just the beginning. The more critical question is will Victoria
let herself love and be loved? The storyline weaves skillfully between the heavy burden of
Victoria's childhood—-her time with Elizabeth, the foster
mother who taught her the language of flowers and also wounded
her more deeply than Victoria can bear to remember—-and
the gauntlet of her present relationship with Grant, a flower
vendor who's irrevocably linked to the darkest secret of her
past. At its core,
The Language of Flowers is a meditation on redemption,
and on how even the most profoundly damaged might learn to
forgive and be forgiven. By opening up Victoria's very
difficult inner world to us, Vanessa Diffenbaugh shows us a
corner of experience hidden to most, and with an astonishing
degree of insight and compassion. So hold on, and keep the
tissue box nearby. This is a book you won’t soon forget.
--Paula McLain
Author Q and A with Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Q: What is the language of flowers?
In
The Language of Flowers, Victoria learns about this
language as a young girl from her prospective adoptive mother
Elizabeth. Elizabeth tells her that years ago, people
communicated through flowers; and if a man gave a young lady a
bouquet of flowers, she would race home and try to decode it
like a secret message. So he would have to choose his flowers
carefully.
Q: Where did you come up with the idea to have Victoria
express herself through flowers?
Q: Why does Victoria decide to create her own flower
dictionary, and what role does it come to play in the
novel?
I understand Victoria’s impulse completely, and I
included a dictionary in the back of the book for the same
reason. If readers are inspired to send messages through
flowers, I wanted there to be a complete, concise, relevant and
consistent list of meanings for modern communication.
Q: How does The Language of Flowers challenge and
reconfigure our concepts of family and motherhood?
To love is difficult. To be a mother is difficult. To be a
mother, alone, with few financial resources and no emotional
support, is so difficult as to be nearly impossible. Yet
society expects us to be able to do it, and as mothers, we
expect ourselves to be able to do it as well. Our standards for
motherhood are so high that many of us harbor intense, secret
guilt for every harsh word we speak to our children; every
negative thought that enters our minds. The pressure is so
powerful that many of us never speak aloud about our
challenges--especially emotional ones--because to do so would
be to risk being viewed as a failure or, worse, a danger to the
very children we love more than anything in the world. With Victoria and Elizabeth, I hope to allow the reader a
window inside the minds of mothers who are trying to do what is
best for their children but who lack the support, resources,
and/or self-confidence to succeed. The results are
heartbreaking for so many mothers who find themselves unable to
raise their children. It is my belief that we could prevent
much child abuse and neglect if we as a society recognized the
intense challenge of motherhood and offered more support for
mothers who want desperately to love and care for their
children.
Q:
The Language of Flowers sheds light on the foster care
system in our country, something with which many of us are not
intimately acquainted. Did you always know you wanted to write
a story about a foster child?
Q: Victoria is such a complex and memorable character.
She has so much to contribute to the world, but has so much
trouble with love and forgiveness, particularly toward herself.
Is she based on someone you know or have known in real
life?
Victoria is clearly different. She is angry and afraid, yet
desperately hopeful; qualities I saw in many of the young
people I worked with throughout the years. Though Victoria is
entirely fictional, I did draw inspiration in bits and pieces
from foster children I have known. One young woman in
particular, who my husband and I mentored many years ago, was
fiery and focused and distrusting and unpredictable in a manner
similar to Victoria. Her history was intense: a number on her
birth certificate where a name should have been; more foster
homes than she could count. Still, she was resilient,
beautiful, smart, and funny. We loved her completely, and she
did her best to sabotage it, over and over again. To this day
my husband and I regret that we couldn’t find a way to
connect with her and become the stable parents she
deserved.
Q: The notion of second chances plays a major role in
The Language of Flowers for many of the characters.
Does this in any way relate to your personal advocacy work with
emancipating foster youth?
Q:
The Language of Flowers is one of those stories that
will stay with its readers for a very long time. What lasting
impression do you wish the book to leave them?
Q: If you were to represent yourself with a bouquet,
which flowers would you choose and why?
Advance praise for *The Language of Flowers
From the Hardcover edition.
Amazon.com Review
A: The Victorian language of flowers began with the publication
of
Le Language des Fleurs, written by Charlotte de Latour
and printed in Paris in 1819. To create the book--which was a
list of flowers and their meanings--de Latour gathered
references to flower symbolism throughout poetry, ancient
mythology and even medicine. The book spawned the science known
as floriography, and between 1830 and 1880, hundreds of similar
floral dictionaries were printed in Europe and America.
A: I’ve always loved the language of flowers. I
discovered Kate Greenaway’s
Language of Flowers in a used bookstore when I was 16,
and couldn’t believe it was such a well-kept secret. How
could something so beautiful and romantic be virtually unknown?
When I started thinking about the book I wanted to write,
Victoria and the language of flowers came to me simultaneously.
I liked the complication of a young woman who has trouble
connecting with others communicating through a forgotten
language that almost no one understands.
A: In many ways, Victoria exists entirely on the periphery of
society. So much is out of the scope of her understanding--how
to get a job, how to make a friend, even how to have a
conversation. But in the world of flowers, with their
predictable growing habits and "non-negotiable" meanings,
Victoria feels safe, comfortable, even at home. All this
changes when she learns that there is more than one definition
for the yellow rose--and then, through research, realizes there
is more than one definition for almost every flower. She feels
her grasp on the one aspect of life she believed to be solid
dissolving away beneath her. In an effort to "re-order" the
universe, Victoria begins to photograph and create her own
dictionary, determined to never have a flower-inspired
miscommunication. She decides to share that information with
others--a decision that brings with it the possibility of love,
connection, career, and community.
A: One of my favorite books is Rainer Maria Rilke’s
Letters to a Young Poet. In it, Rilke writes: "It is
also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human
being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most
difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate
task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other
work is merely preparation."
A: I’ve always had a passion for working with young
people. As my work began to focus on youth in foster care--and
I eventually became a foster parent myself--I became aware of
the incredible injustice of the foster care system in our
country: children moving from home to home, being separated
from siblings, and then being released into the world on their
eighteenth birthday with little support or services. Moreover,
I realized that this injustice was happening virtually
unnoticed. The same sensationalized stories appear in the media
over and over again: violent kids, greedy foster parents, the
occasional horrific child death or romanticized adoption--but
the true story of life inside the system is one that is much
more complex and emotional--and it is a story that is rarely
told. Foster children and foster parents, like children and
adults everywhere, are trying to love and be loved, and to do
the best they can with the emotional and physical resources
they have. Victoria is a character that people can connect with
on an emotional level--at her best and at her worst--which I
hope gives readers a deeper understanding of the realities of
foster care.
A: People often ask me if I drew inspiration for the character
of Victoria from our foster son Tre’von, but Victoria is
about as different from Tre’von as two people could ever
be. Tre’von’s strength is his openness--he has a
quick smile, a big heart, and a social grace that puts everyone
around him at ease. At fourteen, running away from home
barefoot on a cold January night, he had the wisdom and sense
of self-preservation to knock on the door of the nearest fire
station. When he was placed in foster care, he immediately
began to reach out to his teachers and his principal, creating
around himself a protective community of love and support.
A: As my four-year old daughter says to me on a regular basis:
"Mommy, you aren’t perfect." We all make mistakes, and we
all need second chances. For youth in foster care, these
mistakes are often purposeful--if not consciously so; a way to
test the strength of a bond and establish trust in a new
parent. A friend of mine called recently, after a year of
mentoring a sixteen year-old boy, completely distraught. The
young man had lied to him, and it was a major lie, one that put
him in danger. My friend, in his anger, said things he
regretted. My response was this: good. Your response might not
have been perfect, but it was real and your concern was clear.
As long as he was still committed to the young man (which he
was), it didn’t so much matter what my friend had said or
done; what mattered was what he did next. It mattered that he
showed his mentee, through words and actions, that he still
loved him, and that the young man’s mistake
couldn’t change that.
I believe that people are spurred into action when they both
see the injustice of a situation and the possibility for
change. With
The Language of Flowers I tried to write a book that
was honest and true, but hopeful enough to inspire people to
act. Each year, nearly 20,000 young people emancipate from the
foster care system, many of them with nowhere to go and no one
to go to for support. I am launching a non-profit with the goal
to connect every emancipating foster child to a community--a
book club, a women’s club, a church group--to support
them through the transition to adulthood and beyond. It is my
hope that readers everywhere will read my book and become
inspired to partner with emancipating young people in their own
communities.
A: Helioptrope (devoted affection), Black-Eyed Susan (justice),
Hawthorn (hope), Liatris (I will try again), Lisianthus
(appreciation), and Moss (maternal love). These flowers
represent how I am--devoted, affectionate, maternal, and
grateful--and also how I want to be--hopeful, determined, and
constantly working for justice.Review
“This heartbreaking debut novel about mothers and
daughters, love, and the secret significance of flowers had me
weeping with emotion and wonder. Victoria Jones is an
unforgettable heroine and you will never look at flowers the
same way again.”—Tatiana de Rosnay, author of
Sarah’s Key
and A Secret Kept
“A deftly powerful story of finding your way home, even
after you’ve burned every bridge behind you, The
Language of Flowers
took my heart apart, chapter by chapter, then reassembled
the broken pieces in better working condition. I loved this
book.”—Jamie Ford, author of Hotel on the
Corner of Bitter and Sweet
“The Language of Flowers
gives us new definitions of human compassion in all its
forms. Bouquets of laurel and trumpet vine await this
beautifully arranged story!”—Helen Simonson, author
of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand
“Devastating, hopeful, and beautifully written, The
Language of Flowers
is a testament to the tender mercies and miraculous healing
power of love.”—Beth Hoffman, author of Saving
CeeCee Honeycutt
“This hope-soaked, glorious book speaks to every
once-broken, cracked, or poorly mended heart about the risks we
take to heal, to be fully human, to truly connect. The
Language of Flowers
is an astonishingly assured debut.”—Joshilyn
Jackson, author of Backseat Saints
“Enchanting, ennobling, and powerfully engaging,
Diffenbaugh’s artfully accomplished debut novel lends
poignant testimony to the multitude of mysteries held in the
human heart.”—Booklist* (starred review)