Flowers are words which even a babe may understand.
ARTHUR CLEVELAND COXE, The Singing of Birds
The plot starts with Victoria on her 18th birthday, which is a big day for the troubled foster girl, who is going to move out of the foster care system to the real world with a transition in the “gathering home”
“This is it, you know,” said Meredith Combs- the social worker”your life starts here. no one to blame yourself from here on out.”
We then move through Victoria’s memories, where she remembers her life with her last foster parent that was supposed to adopt her”Elizabeth”, Victoria starts to tell us about the only part of her child that mattered, and the only person that she truly felt that she belonged to. She also tells us about how Elizabeth thought language of flowers. I couldn’t stop thinking, what could have possibly happened, that would make Victoria loose her home and become this disturbed person. We then move back and forth along Victoria’s life.
“I’m talking about the language of flowers,” Elizabeth said “It’s from the Victorian era, like your name. If a man gave a young lady abouquet of flowers, she would race home and try to decode it like a secret message. Red roses mean love, yellow roses infidelity. so a man have to choose his flowers carefully”
My favorite part was when she starts to work in the flower shop for Renata. I loved how she shows brilliance in dealing with flowers and how did this make her communicate with and help other people in a special way. Here she meets Grant _the shadow from her past_ that helps her by his love to be a better person, and you think that this will fix Victoria forever, but it doesn’t because of her belief that she is not capable of love and that she destroys any person that she comes close too.
At this point, Victoria’s life is about to change again in the most amazing and painful way, and she tries to find a reconciliation with her past, so she could live peacefully, and for that she has hazel to help her.
This was the first book I read about a girl in a foster care system, and the first written by Vanessa Diffenbaugh, and I absolutely love it. I was always wondering whats going to happen next and couldnt stop turning the pages, but many times I found that it was so overwhelming that I needed to stop reading for awhile.
Mainly reviewers loved the book, mainly the language of flowers that made the book both informing and entertaining. Other’s thought that the first part of the book was better written and more realistic than the second half, and found it difficult to believe that all these people were welling to love Victoria and help her. One of the best review’s was when Cecelia Ahern said that she wished she had wrote this book. For me I loved how the author described the feelings Victoria go through at different stages and how her passion for flowers helped her through hard times.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh was born in San Francisco and raised in Chico, California. After studying creative writing and education at Stanford, she went on to teach art and writing to youth in low-income communities. Vanessa Diffenbaugh is also the founder of the Camellia Network. The mission of the Camellia Network is to create a nationwide movement to support youth transitioning from foster care. In The Language of Flowers, Camellia [kuh-meel-yuh] means “My Destiny is in Your Hands.” Vanessa found inspiration to write the language of flowers in her own experience as a foster mother.*
*copied from her personal page
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