Read Sure
Length 352
Quick Review Through the Victorian language of flowers, a newly emancipated foster girl finds acceptance and forgiveness.
The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh was loaned to me by my friend, Amanda of Amanda Bee’s Florals. It’s a great easy read combining a few things I love: language, flowers, and books. I needed something light to interrupt the maelstrom of books I’m reading to catch up after vacation.
Victoria Jones is newly emancipated from the foster system. She had always been a problem child and felt no reason to change. Homeless, she found a job in the one place she could: a flower shop. Her only good foster home taught her about the Victorian meanings for flowers. Her years of challenging everyone and everything combined with the foster system and constant changes, she lacked social skills. Flowers were her only means of feeling whole and communicating with the world.
Diffenbaugh demonstrates a deep understanding for the struggles foster kids endure in the system. She and her husband adopted a son out of the foster system, and the co-founder of the Camellia Network. It is an endemic close to her heart. The Language of Flowers is deeply touching and heartbreaking. Victoria yearns for the universal human desires of connection, acceptance, forgiveness, and love. Flowers help her find everything she is looking for from within and the outside world.
The meanings of flowers have always intrigued me, so this was fun to read. At the end of the novel, there is a short dictionary of flowers and their meanings. The writing is well-done and compelling. The plot is well thought out and supports the underlying theme that the foster system repeatedly and continually lets children down every step of the way. It wraps all the loose ends up nicely into a happy ending. The foreshadowing throughout the book is subtle, but still obvious enough the plot lays itself out in the first 87 pages.
I enjoyed reading The Language of Flowers in an afternoon. It was a pleasant surprise from what I thought it would be: a sappy love story. It has much deeper themes with an underlying call to action.
Memorable Quotes
“Mothers must all secretly despise their children for the inexcusable pain of childbirth.”