Book Review No.33 – The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

I discovered Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s ‘The Language of Flowers’ a few weeks back during a random browsing session at the bookstore. The book jumped at me and though I tried putting it back on the shelf, the pull of the book was so strong that I couldn’t do that. I started reading it a few days back and finished it yesterday. Here is what I think.

 

 

What I think

 

I read the description of the book on its back cover and that was the one which pulled me towards the book and made me get it. That description of the book is so perfect that I am giving it here. This is how it goes. 

 

The Victorian language of flowers was used to express emotions: honeysuckle for devotion, azaleas for passion, and red roses for love. But for Victoria Jones, it has been more useful in communicating feelings like 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, Victoria has nowhere to go and sleeps in a public park, where she plants a small garden of her own. When her talent is spotted by a local florist, she discovers her gift for helping others through the flowers she chooses for them. But it takes meeting a mysterious vendor at the flower market for her to realize what’s been missing in her own life. As she starts to fall for him, she’s forced to confront a painful secret from her past and decide whether it’s worth risking everything for a second chance at happiness.

 

The Language of Flowers is a heartbreaking and redemptive novel about the meaning of flowers, the meaning of family and the meaning of love.

 

The book is structured with alternative chapters in different time periods. The events in the first chapter happen during the present, and the events in the next chapter happen at a time around eight years back. The narrator of the story is Victoria Jones, an eighteen year-old girl who has been abandoned at birth and has spent her childhood in foster homes and group homes. Now she is a fully grown adult and she has to move out of a group home and make a her way in the world. She doesn’t have a high school diploma or any other formal qualification. The only thing she knows is about flowers – their names, how they look like and the meanings that they stand for. She has never seen real unconditional love – atleast that is what we are made to feel at this point. But the plot arc which tells the story of the past describes a time when Victoria is being adopted by a woman called Elizabeth, and how Elizabeth loves Victoria unconditionally, but also firmly, not tolerating Victoria’s violent behaviour, and how Elizabeth touches something deep in Victoria’s heart and how Victoria’s warms up to her. Things are going quite nicely and Elizabeth and Victoria love each other like a mother and daughter. Elizabeth home-schools Victoria in language and arithmetic and also on flowers, grapes and vineyards. The adoption hearing is round the corner. Unfortunately, at this time, complex things happen in their lives. We can infer from the present day situation that these complex things have driven Victoria and Elizabeth apart. We yearn to know what they were. Meanwhile in the present day Victoria is discovered by a florist and she starts working for her. She gets an individual room on rent for the first time in her life. Then she meets a flower vendor at the market and the vendor sends her a message through flowers. Victoria is confused, because she has seen people using flowers to make arrangements and bouquets only from an aesthetic perspective but she hasn’t seen anyone who knows how to send messages through flowers. She thought that it was a secret that only she knew. She replies back to his message with her own flower message and their exciting conversation begins. One thing leads to another and Victoria falls in love with the flower vendor, and he with her. But an unknown fear lurks at the back of her heart – she had a chance of happiness once upon a time and it ended in tragedy. She fears it will happen again. What happens next and how the two plot arcs come together, form the rest of the story.

 

I liked the heroine of the story, Victoria, very much. I also liked her adopted mother Elizabeth – one of my favourite characters in the story – and Grant, the mysterious flower vendor, who becomes the love of her life. When I think about it, I think I liked most of the other characters too, each in a different way – Renata, Natalya, Mother Ruby, Marlena, Hazel. Maybe I didn’t like Meredith much.

 

I loved ‘The Language of Flowers’. I loved it for showing how feelings and emotions can be revealed through flowers. I loved it because it is about mothers and daughters and love in all its complex shades. The book had one of the most beautiful descriptions of the birth of a baby that I have ever read and also describes the initial days of a baby’s life when a mother struggles to cope with her life which has become bewildering and complex. It looked like the author, Vanessa Diffenbaugh, had poured her heart and soul into the book. I loved even the acknowledgements page where the author says – “I would like to thank my children…for teaching me to be a mother, and loving me through my mistakes.” The book made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me despair, it made me smile. I despaired and agonized over the fate of the heroine, Victoria, and the other main characters – the romantic part of the my heart said that the author will ensure that they will find happiness in the end, while the cynical part of my heart said that the author will take the opposite route and it will all end in a tragedy. I loved it when the author decided to humour the romantic part of my heart.

 

‘The Language of Flowers’ is one of my favourite reads of the year. And probably one of my favourite books of all time. I hope to re-read it again – for the beauty of its story and for the redemptive ending. I am hoping to gift it to my favourite friends during the holiday season. I hope it catches the eyes of a Hollywood producer – it will make a wonderful, beautiful movie. Highly recommended J

 

I will leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.

 

A Language of Lovers

 

      “I’m more of a thistle-peony-basil kind of girl,” I said.

      “Misanthropy-anger-hate,” said Grant. “Hmm.”

      I turned away. “You asked,” I said.

      “It’s kind of ironic, don’t you think?” he asked, looking around us at the roses. They were all in bloom, and not one was yellow. “Here you are, obsessed with a romantic language – a language invented for expression between lovers – and you use it to spread animosity.”

 

The Human Touch

 

The relentlessness with which these women tried to repair their relationships was foreign to me; I didn’t understand why they didn’t simply give up.

      I knew that if it were me I would have let go: of a man, of the child, and of the women with whom I discussed them. But for the first time in my life, this thought did not bring me relief. I began to notice the ways in which I kept myself isolated. There were obvious things, such as living in a closet with six locks, and subtler ones, such as working on the opposite side of the table from Renata or standing behind the cash register when I talked to customers. Whenever possible, I separated my body from those around me with plaster walls, solid wood tables, or heavy metal objects.

      But somehow, over six careful months, Grant had broken through this. I not only permitted his touch, I craved it, and I started to wonder if, perhaps change was possible for me. I began to hope my pattern of letting go was something that could be outgrown, like a childhood dislike of onions or spicy food.

 

On Childbirth

 

I would hate my child for this. Mothers must all secretly despise their children for the inexcusable pain of childbirth. I understood my own mother in that moment as clearly as if we had just been introduced. I imagined her sneaking out of the hospital alone, her body split in two, abandoning her perfect swaddled baby, the baby she had exchanged for her own once-perfect body, her own once-pain-free existence. The pain and sacrifice were not forgivable. I did not deserve to be forgiven. Looking in the mirror, I tried to imagine my mother’s face.

 

Magical perfection

 

She was perfect. I knew this the moment she emerged from my body, white and wet and wailing. Beyond the requisite ten fingers and ten toes, the beating heart, the lungs inhaling and exhaling oxygen, my daughter knew how to scream. She knew how to make herself heard. She knew how to reach out and latch on. She knew what she needed to do to survive. I didn’t know how it was possible that such perfection could have developed within a body as flawed as my own, but when I looked into her face, I saw that it clearly was.

 

“The First Gift”

 

      Mother Ruby had told me the baby would sleep for six or more hours the first night, exhausted from the birth. It’s the first gift that a child gives its mother, she told me before she left. Not the last. Take it, and sleep.

 

Moss don’t have roots

 

If it was true that moss did not have roots, and maternal love could grow spontaneously, as if from nothing, perhaps I had been wrong to believe myself unfit to raise my daughter. Perhaps the unattached, the unwanted, the unloved, could grow to give love as lushly as anyone else.

 

Have you read ‘The Language of Flowers’? What do you think about it?

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