I read this for my book group, as a companion to Orphan Train. After I'd read about 100 pages, I found that I felt really good. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it was the book's emphasis on cultivating flowers and cooking as nurturing activities that enrich both the performer and the recipient. Perhaps it was the "magic" element: in this novel, the protagonist has a special gift and is able to choose the flowers for her customers that solve their problems. First, it's a man who misses the sunny disposition his wife used to have; then it's a young woman who has been disappointed in love many times.Victoria is a ward of the state, having been given up by her mother shortly after her birth. The novel opens on her 18th birthday, her last birthday "in care," when her social worker comes to take her to special housing where she can live rent-free for three months.
Victoria is an angry person, and she's unmotivated to find the job she needs and a real place to live. But she is passionate about working with plants. She spends the three months she is supposed to use to find a job stealing plants from gardens and using them to create her own garden in a city park.
When she's kicked out, she goes to sleep in her garden. When her slumber is disturbed by amorous lovers one night, she realizes she needs a real home, perhaps a room somewhere. So she looks, for the first time, for a job and approaches a local florist. The florist won't hire her, but offers her $5 to load her truck.
The florist, Renata, tells her that it's a busy season for her, creating bouquets and centerpieces for weddings. Renata offers to hire Victoria part-time, and her brilliant career as a floral designer/magic maker begins.
Soon she meets a young man in the flower market who intrigues her. As they begin, very slowly, to court using the "language of flowers" we follow her in flashback to her childhood placement with a foster parent, Elizabeth, who owned a vineyard and taught her about the language of flowers.
I was a little surprised that not everyone in my book group liked this book. One person said that she found that it dragged a little in the middle (authors, trust your editors!). I wouldn't have noticed because when I read it I was: struggling to get it read on time; just grateful that it was an easy read; and I was reading it on an electronic device and having techinical problems which kept interrupting the flow of the narrative. Curse you, imperfect technology! This was Diffenbaugh's debut novel, and since it's become a book club favorite, I think it has to be termed a success.
I was under the impression that she has written a second novel, but I must be mistaken because I can't find any reference to it on the Internet. I did learn that Diffenbaugh and her husband foster children, adopted a child, and that she has formed a not-for-profit called The Camellia Network to help foster care children who age out of the system.
Now having read the end of the novel, I think this book emphasizes celebrating our strengths and part of its feel-good quality is its embrace of self-acceptance. Victoria keenly feels that lack of nurture (sometimes also the lack of food) in her childhood, but almost from the beginning of the novel she is nurturing others by selecting flowers for them.
One other thing: When I was in Mod Brit Lit long ago, I enjoyed reading Sons and Lovers. When I got to class, I was pretty shocked. "Did I read the wrong novel?", I asked myself, because I could not understand the professor's remarks or my fellow student's responses. During our book group discussion, I was surprised by some participants' comments about not being able to understand the motivation of the characters at critical points in both novels. In fact, the author explains why the characters make the decisions that they do.
I conclude (not originally) that we read what we want; we ignore that which doesn't interest us or of which we disapprove. There are probably a whole bunch of things that we ignore, all the time. I can't help wondering, however, if we would enjoy literature more if we made a greater attempt to be open to it.
