FANGS, WANDS & FAIRY DUST: The Language of Flowers

Random House

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. Random House

Amazon Availability
Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books (August 23, 2011)
Kindle Edition: 5 KB
Publisher: Ballantine Books (August 23, 2011)
Sold by: Random House Digital, Inc.
Audio CD from Random House Audio; Unabridged edition (August 23, 2011
Language: English
ARC provided by publisher without expectation. All opinions herein are my own unless otherwise cited. No financial remuneration was exchanged.

“What is it like to try to love if you’ve never been loved yourself?”*

I received this ARC in a package of books presented to guests who attended a Tea at Random House during BEA 2011. I was excited because I had read it is the most anticipated release this summer. It has already been released in thirty countries due to publishing schedules, and I've read great things about it. I was pleased to find it is as good as the promotions claim. I feel honored to have an opportunity to tell you about The Language of Flowers.

The book is well written and edited. But the elegance of the writing takes a back seat to the immediacy of the heartbreaking story and the damaged young woman who communicates through flowers.

I have read books where the language of flowers figured as a way for lovers to send messages about intent and desires. But the use was usually incidental to the plot and characters—a prop.

Diffenbaugh uses the Language of Flowers as the fabric of her story about a young woman trapped in the foster care system, even after she is emancipated from it. The character, Victoria, uses the language of flowers to express emotions to a world that doesn’t understand the language, or her. For Victoria, the language of flowers is no less than her lifeline, a way she can express emotion when she cannot risk opening up herself verbally. Words give people power over you, as Victoria sadly learns throughout her life. If you tell someone you hate peas, then they can sadistically feed you nothing but. If you admit love you give someone the ultimate power over your emotional life.

But Victoria learns that you can tell people what you feel if you speak a language they don’t understand, or recognize as a form of communication. You can express hate, love, pain, or encouragement like a secret blessing or curse.

Image via Wikipedia

Purple Lilac symbolizes 1st Emotions of Love

Diffenbaugh sheds light on the plight of foster and abused children and what happens to some emotionally and she is uniquely able to speak about the system with authority. In an interview on Amazon.com she discusses the story:

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.

For Victoria, some of the hate she had expressed by acting out she can now express by giving someone a stalk of basil, which means hate. It is all the more powerful in that the recipient has no idea. It is a private joke that buttresses her fragile sense of self.
Of course, Elizabeth, the woman who teaches Victoria about flowers, knows what each gift means. This is the woman who comes closest to adopting Victoria but who allows her own demons to get in the way. These demons push Victoria into an act the magnitude of which she fails to foresee and for which she punishes herself for many years.

Elizabeth tells Victoria that the meaning of each flower is non-negotiable. Much later Victoria learns that there are multiple meanings for some flowers. But, Elizabeth sees constructs in black or white and it is her rigid understanding of the world that starts the downward spiral that destroys the spark of love and life she had begun to kindle within Victoria. Sometimes foster children “know” they are going to lose the love they value so they refuse it and push it away before if can be taken from them. When warming up to it they can be dispassionate, as Victoria is with her boyfriend.

I know that learning there is more than one meaning is vital to Victoria’s progress, possibly in that she has to immerse herself so fully into the language that it becomes art rather than just a rudimentary form of expression. Or it could be that she learns there can be more than one outcome for herself as well. When emancipated at 18 from the foster system, Victoria still lives as if it is what is holding her back. I am terrified for this eighteen year-old girl who is homeless. That she manages to get anywhere in the normal world is a miracle, and the miracle is wrought by flowers and how she communicates with them. Eventually her bouquets are not just like spells they become spells that act like powerful antidotes.

Victoria mistakenly believes that she is the only person in the world who is not whole, who is not perfect, who was not loved as she should have been. Her prodigious appetite for food must be both symbolic and a response to having been hungry for many years in many ways. She reminds me of the kitten I rescued last fall who ate ten cans of food in one day. Of course, we are all damaged in one way or another, as her boss Renata tells her. Elizabeth is very damaged due to a family history of mental illness.

Renata is damaged by being a somewhat straight arrow raised by a bohemian midwife. She is also a remarkably accepting and expansive person, also a product of that upbringing. I enjoyed Renata’s mother, Mother Ruby, and the expansiveness with which she is able to embrace Victoria. There is no need to doubt or reject her love because it is for everyone. It is amusing to me that the two names of Mother Ruby’s daughters we learn are Renata and Natalya. Both names contain the root word “Nata,” Latin for born.

But, Renata’s emotional disability doesn’t prevent her from getting out of bed for a week, or from knowing how to tell one’s lover something of importance. Victoria’s distress is much greater. While Renata’s upbringing is a blessing and, to her, a curse, it is hard to see anything positive in Victoria’s except the fact of her physical survival. The man who understands her floral messages, Grant, is remarkably tenacious, and as a rediscovered part of Victoria’s past gives her a way to come to grips with the secret she has hidden from so long, to come to the forgiveness she has so long denied herself and the world.

My only issue with the book is Victoria’s physical and emotional age when she has her epiphanies and starts her business. Although Victoria is self-reliant in many ways and has gone through horrors children should not have to experience, the degree of emotional damage is so great, that I find it hard to believe her mature enough to manage without any counseling. Everyone must assume she has had counseling through the system, the panacea for social ills.

Of course millions of severely damaged people are successful and even a neglected seedling can grow and become a beautiful flower with no help at all. This book will stun you in its naked portrayal of the life of this young woman. It is all honesty&mdashgood or bad.

I am thrilled to be able to agree with others who have praised this book and give it my MUST READ recommendation.

*This phrase is in the following video in which Vanessa Diffenbaugh tells us about the young woman who more than anyone else inspired the idea for her new book, The Language of Flowers.