"The Language of Flowers" by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

 

SUMMARY :

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
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 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 with nowhere to go, Victoria realizes she has a gift for helping others through the flowers she chooses for them. But an unexpected encounter with a mysterious stranger 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.

PARTICULARS OF THE BOOK :
Published by:  Random House
Pages:  304
Genre:  Fiction
Author:  Vanessa Diffenbaugh
More about the book:  The Language of Flowers

ABOUT THE AUTHOR :

To write The Language of Flowers, Vanessa Diffenbaugh found inspiration in her own experience as a foster mother. After studying creative writing and education at Stanford University, Vanessa taught art and writing to youth in low-income communities. She and her husband, PK, have three children and live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is her first novel.


Co-REVIEWER, JESSICA, REVIEWS :  

  

“I must have flowers, always, and always.”

Claude Monet
 

The LANGUAGE of FLOWERS by Vanessa Diffenbaugh resonates with the reader.  This novel reaches deep into your heart and opens a special section just for Victoria, the protagonist and her flowers.  This lush section, like a Monet painting, opens a market of colorful, glorious flowers in your mind’s eye.  The vision settles in quietly and becomes part of you.  The reader, like the main character Victoria, blossoms and grows with her, quite like a tiny pink flower breaking through cracked concrete on a dirty city street. A rooted bond forms between the reader, the characters, and the flowers that remains long after the last page is read. 

The reader is gifted with the language of flowers. 

 

 Victoria is damaged, forgotten, and rejected.  She is an abandoned child, left for institutions and foster homes to nurture. She quickly masters the art of seclusion, introversion, and violence early, and preys upon innocent victims with spurts of physical violence, disrespectful words, and bouts of anger.  She practices pushing people away, giving them the worst before they would ever know her best.  She prides herself on her ability to maintain distance from others. 

 Her only interest is in flowers.

 Diffenbaugh gives Victoria a voice through the flowers, it is not juvenile or superficial.    She writes with such power that the reader feels the agony of isolation with her.  The first person narrative is compelling and intelligent.  This is not a classic coming of age story, a girl gone bad becomes good story… this is a raw and thought provoking look inside the dark mind of a recluse, a social outcast, a genius.  The reader looks in through a grimy window into the sheltered soul of a broken heart.   Diffenbaugh puts back the pieces, preparing the soil, working the landscape, and effectively beginning a garden of insight.

 

In the novel, Victoria’s passion for flowers and their meanings is ignited and cultivated by a foster/adoptive parent, a single woman who is also reclusive and matchless.  The flowers are for them a way of life, a mode of communication, a vehicle for expressing human emotions and maintaining connection to the past long abandoned and unstable. The flowers become a vehicle hopeful for a different future.  The characters connect fluidly amongst a myriad of plants. 

 

In Victoria’s world, the flowers are a foundation.  As the relationships between Victoria and the other characters in the novel deepen and develop, the flowers and their meanings are revealed, each with a specific purpose.  Each flower tenderly noticed and pruned, defined and protected. Victoria observes  each flower as a masterpiece, unique, influential and timeless. 

 

What I treasure most about this novel is how Diffenbaugh cultivates the reader, as a tender shoot needing time and encouragement to bloom.  I am neither a botanist, nor a horticulturist, yet from the first page of the novel, I too am driven to understand Victoria, and be a part of her world.  I love flowers, and have always appreciated their beauty and fragrance, and yet they were never as special to me as they are now, because of THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS.   The amazing thing about this novel is the journey in and around the heart, the heartache of loneliness and the triumph of humanity that is conveyed through careful insights and tender language. 

 

To me, only a person with extraordinary sensitivity and insight can evoke compassion from the reader.  The reader, like the weather man, often tries to predict the path of this wonderfully damaged girl, yet Diffenbaugh surprises the reader with the foolishness of predictions, and leaves me wanting more, curious, and hopeful.  I am typically skeptical of seemingly romanticized stories of broken people finding a passion and filling the void, but this novel sets a new standard.  This novel is alive with interpretations of humanity, descriptions of loneliness, and the emptiness the world offers one without passion.

 

Diffenbaugh creates unforgettable characters that live in a world that is apart from one I know.  Because of her gift for language and research, the flowers take on a life that reaches beyond what I would have imagined I would be left with at the novel’s end. 

This is a one of a kind read, a gift to the reader, and an amazing tribute to struggle, perseverance, passion, and flowers.

 

 

5 stars           Jessica/Another Bookish Dame

 

 

 

 

"The Flower Reader" by Elizabeth Loupas~Historical Fiction Lovers Take Note!

With a particular eye to the beauty and mystery of flowers and also an understanding of the powers they hold, young Rinette Leslie of Granmuir, Scotland becomes the unlikely and reluctant confidant of Queen Mary of Guise. But Rinette's only wish is to marry her childhood sweetheart and to return to her beloved homeland.  Instead, she's caught up in a court intrigue that will affect her life and those she loves for many years to come.

Summary:
In the sweeping new novel from the author of The Second Duchess, dangerous secrets lead a passionate young woman into a maze of murder and conspiracy as Mary, Queen of Scots, comes home to reign in a treacherously divided Scotland….

With her dying breath, Mary of Guise entrusts a silver casket to Rinette Leslie of Granmuir, who possesses the ancient gift of floromancy. Inside the casket, and meant only for the young Mary, Queen of Scots, are papers the old queen has painstakingly collected—the darkest secrets of every Scottish lord and explosive private prophecies prepared by Nostradamus. Rinette risks her life to keep the casket safe, but she makes a fatal mistake: she shows it to her beloved young husband. On the very day the young queen comes home, Rinette’s husband is brutally assassinated.

Devastated, Rinette demands justice from the queen before she will surrender the casket. Amid glittering masques and opulent weddings, courtly intrigues and Highland rebellions, the queen’s agents and Rinette herself search for the shadowy assassin. They are surrounded by ruthless men from all over Europe who will do anything to force Rinette to give up the casket—threatening her life, stripping her of her beloved castle by the sea, forcing her to marry a man she hates, and driving her from the man she has reluctantly grown to love. In the end, the flowers are all she can trust—and only the flowers will lead her safely home to Granmuir.

Publisher: New American Library
448p

Author: Elizabeth Loupas

Author's website: http://elizabethloupas.com

A Bit About the Author:

Elizabeth Loupas lives near the Elm Fork of the Trinity River, halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. She is presently a novelist, freelance writer and amateur historian. In other times and other places she has been a radio network vice president, a reference librarian, a business-to-business magazine editor, and a tutor in English literature.

One of her passions is the art and poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites. This led her to the Rossettis and the Brownings, and the project nearest and dearest to her heart--her novel THE SECOND DUCHESS, based on Robert Browning's poem "My Last Duchess."

She hates housework, cold weather, and wearing shoes. She loves animals, gardens, and popcorn. Not surprisingly she lives in a state of happy barefoot chaos with her delightful and faintly bemused husband (the Broadcasting Legend), her herb garden, her popcorn popper, and two beagles.

You can find Ms Loupas's blog at:  http://www.elizabethloupas.com/blog/

*Note:  You'll find some more very interesting things here about "The Flower Reader" and a experience the very active sense of humor of Ms Loupas!!  :]

The Dame's Review:

I enjoyed this book immensely.  From start to finish I found Rinnette one of the most engaging and feisty of heroines historical fiction has offered in a good while.  There are many strong historical women characters in recent historical fiction I've had the pleasure of reading, and I'm not meaning to take my praise from them. However, the character of Rinnette bursts forth from the start, showing her strong resolve to keep herself, her loved ones, her property and her resolve under murderous pressures!  I loved her brave spirit and her willingness to stare down death and queens despite her youth, power and lack of weapons.  Because of this beautiful, mystically talented and unabashedly strong woman this novel is one of my favorite historical novels this season.

Rinnette is a brilliant character who will endear herself to readers and keep you hungry to finish her story.

Played out on the world stage of the courts where such historic figures reigned such as Queen Mary of Guise, Mary Queen of Scots and the Scottish clans...not to mention such notables as Nostradamus,

Elizabeth Queen of England, and Catherine de Medicis, this is a tapestry of time and

intrigue that is absorbing in and of itself.  Elizabeth Loupas has then laid a set of secrets and mysteries that rival the CIA!  It's a plot that kept me reading, and that moved at a steady, rapid pace. 

I appreciated her writing style and her development of a world within the real world with adjunct characters that didn't really exist but seemed plausible!

The relationships between her characters; Rinnette with her husband and her children, for instance, was palpable, striking at my heart strings.  I felt a deep sense of loss with her at times, and a joy at other times.  Ms Loupas has a strong gift of portraying emotion and personal relationships that gives her book depth and character. 

I really loved the element of the flowers and Rinnettes "reading" of them at every bend as she encountered friend and foe.  This added a dimension to the book unlike any other historical fiction I'd read, obviously!  In her section at the back of the book, Ms Loupas is interviewed about this element and she gives the history behind flower "discernment."  I found it fascinating.  The connection with herbal healing as we know it today and our use of "diffusion" for different states of relaxation and such, show us some small connection to the practice Rinnette must have been using. 

On a deeper level, and with a immediate mystical response, Rinnette was a master "flower reader" foretelling the future constantly...it was so exciting to read this part of Elizabeth Loupas's story.

In summary, a great book of historical fiction which I absolutely adored reading.  I highly recommend it to all lovers of the genre, and to others of you who are thinking of taking a step into historical fiction.  It is a mystical, feminist, mystery and family dynamic of a book.  Great reading!

5 stars

Deborah/TheBookishDame

This book is brought to you on tour in connect with:

To follow the tour please go to:  http://hfvirtualbooktours.blogspot.com/2012/03/elizabeth-loupas-on-tour-for-flower.html

To purchase this book go to:  Amazon.com