The Language of Flowers: A Novel

Only a day or two passed before I read “The Language of Flowers” a second time.Thank goodness.My memory, created during the first reading, holds story-holes. I created ugly potholes by not knowing which detail to understand, now or appreciate later --- during the first reading. And, holes need filling.Every detail, each symbol, each sub-theme, page by page means more to me now, almost as if I were beginning to learn a new language. The second reading shows and validates details and sub-themes missed the first time. “It feels as if I’m reading a different book,” I say to myself. And I anticipate each additional reading will thicken understanding of what the story shares.I love this story, as painful as it is at times..During the first reading, I keep reading one more page, then one more chapter. Then I read another page, another chapter, on and on. To stop and wet my dry mouth and throat seems a time-waster. Each chapter introduces a surprise. Each chapter's last sentence keeps me anticipating the unexpected that Diffenbaugh will share next. While most of Victoria’s jaw-droppers displease me or make me feel uncomfortable, they keep fascinating and riveting my focus, as I read and turn page ... after page ... after page--- not able to stop.Two questions birth themselves and stay with me, as I move through this tale:• How real is this story? It feels like a dream, a bad one --- no, perhaps a nightmare, for all characters.• Why is the book called “The Language of Flowers?” The title feels light-hearted, maybe literary, even botanical --- almost, even artificial. Yet, I know it’s not.The second reading, I keep working to flesh-out a comfortable answer to the story’s purpose. Vanessa presents Victoria's story as a real-world experience --- yet it doesn’t feel believably so. Wounds and damages just don’t heal as quickly as the story's words and rhythms suggest, in real-life.I ask: Might this story’s content be identified as a blend or a collage of an adult contemporary fairy tale, a fantasy, a story of secular-mysticism, a fictional memoir, a surrealistic metaphor, an unfinished psychological case-study draft?Is it?I wonder.Perchance it’s imaginary.I keep searching the story’s content. “Is it phantasmagoria-like?" I ask myself. "Does the text hide a less obvious more meaningful or realistic solution?"Hmm?Coincidently, I watched Offenbach’s fabulous opera “Les Contes de’ Hoffmann,” between my first and second readings. With tears in my eyes, I recognize that in the epilogue, sung by the muse (Kate Lindsey) and The Metropolitan Opera Chorus*, I hear Offenbach’s music, and the English subtitles answer the two questions which developed during my first read.The opera’s ending words cause me to feel that Diffenbaugh’s muse might well have been like the one portrayed by Offenbach --- if not the same.I share some words from Hoffman's opera for your consideration:"Let the ashes of your heart rekindle your genius.“Smile upon your sorrows with serenity.“Your muse will comfort you.“Your suffering will be blessed.“One grows through love...and grows more through tears.“Let the ashes of your heart...rekindle your genius.“Smile upon your sorrows with serenity.“Your muse will comfort you.“Your suffering will be blessed.“Love lends man greatness.“Tears make him greater still. "“The Language of Flowers” is about much, much more than simply Victoria's (Diffenbaugh's) flowers' symbolic and mystical meanings. May you grow from the pain and suffering you are likely to feel, about Victoria and memories of your life-experiences, while you read this remarkable book. What will your favored flowers communicate to you? What will you be trying to communicate with the someone to whom you send your selected flowers?Victoria, Grant, and Elizabeth, and maybe you and me, grow and develop as we learn from life-experiences. And that we live individually and personally.Let your muse speak insights to you.As my reading-muse whispers insights from Diffenbaugh’s text, “The Language of Flowers” becomes increasingly valuable to me.Some reviewers give 5-stars when a book introduces them to something that feels as if it's giving them an insight that may change their life. "The Language of Flowers" might be one that carries life-modifying and enriching insights. Insights revealed while reading a book that is shared surreptitiously, simultaneously, with another work that peels similar scales from our eyes, unexpectedly --- even when 180-years separate one text and the other. As they did in this review's example.I gave the author’s book 4-stars when I finished the first read. After the second, I changed to 5-stars. Is there a rating higher than 5-stars, for me to use after I reread this wonderfully and beautifully written tale a third, fourth, and fifth time?Yes, there is --- even though there is no place to validate higher rankings with a checkmark.Instead, we may need to find a reading-muse to whisper Diffenbaugh’s secrets to us. And then be content with what we hear.*(December 19, 2009 performance)

The Language of Flowers is an absorbing and redemptive novel about isolation, anger, flowers, and love. The novel traces the life of Victoria Jones who is abandoned by her parents and placed in numerous foster homes. Victoria develops an intense anti-social attitude to all she comes in contact with including those who are genuine in their desire to help and even be affectionate towards her. The Language of Flowers provide the one thing that she can believe in. ‘I had been loyal to nothing except the language of flowers. If I started lying about it, there would be nothing left in my life that was beautiful or true.’ The Victorian language of flowers was used to express emotions: honeysuckle for devotion, azaleas for passion, and red roses for love. Victoria uses the language to express negative emotions like grief, mistrust and solitude.The novel starts slowly but builds to a shattering climax in the third part. Mystery and suspense are highly developed and it is only at the very end that all is revealed.The author gives us deep insight into Victoria and why she and many others develop into anti social beings. The reader can feel the intensity of the rage, the hatred and when it comes, the love, that Victoria feels. Victoria at times seems becoming a female version of Kevin (from “We need to talk about Kevin ”).Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s descriptions of flowers and food in particular are sensual and enjoyable. The novel is set in San Francisco, a beautiful city full of flowers in the summertime, an ideal setting for a book involving flowers. The chapter system kept me on edge. The chapters alternate between the younger 9-year-old Victoria and the 18-year-old Victoria. Parallel events occur in two time frames, so that fiascos, hospitalizations and moments of dramatic ripening in one time frame coincides with a similar event in the other.At times the author went too far with flowers. Flowers might be symbols but could a wild bouquet of mums and periwinkles cause someone to have true and tender recollections? The book is excessively female orientated. A woman writes it about a young woman who has a female child and searches for someone to be her mother. Men are few and not generally developed as characters. Victoria has a child with the one significant male character Grant. He is the big, strong, a great cook with somewhat motherly nature. A child is the product of a union between a man and a woman so it is morally wrong for a pregnant woman to take a child away without even consulting the father. Especially a father like Grant.