Poudelivre

Like so many other books I’ve found and read, I didn’t quite know what The language of flowers was about, but I’d heard good reviews of it and I was curious. It turned out to be a good, even a great, book, but not as good as I had expected.

Victoria Jones is an eighteen year old girl who has never met her parents. She was abandoned when she was only a baby and have been living with different families as a foster child ever since. When she was teen and no one wanted to adopt her, Victoria ended up in different placement homes, along with other girls in the same situation. Unadoptable girls. Unwanted girls.

Victoria leaves the placement home when she’s eighteen and moves in to the last thing the government can give her. A house filled with other girls exactly like her, where she can live only if she pays the rent. But Victoria, who never finished school, can’t get a job before she has grown herself a garden. She love flowers and always has and now that she’s finally alone, she wants to do things she likes and not what other people wants. But the garden is a fulltime project and when Victoria hasn’t found a job after a month, she’s kicked out of the house and lives like a homeless in the park, next to her garden. It isn’t until she gets a job as an assistant to a florist as she realizes that there are more to life than what she has seen when growing up. In the florist shop, life suddenly has a meaning and before she knows it, Victoria has even fallen in love with a man selling flowers on the flowers market. Life seems to be perfect, until Victoria’s dark past finally catches up to her. Can she tell the man she loves about the secret, buried deep in her childhood, or will she live alone with her flowers forever?

It is, in sort, a very beautiful book about a young woman who has been through more as a child then some grownups have during their entire lifetime. She was an angry child and an angry young adult, but she changes and becomes a different adult, seeing that there is hope for everyone. Anyone can turn into something beautiful.

I liked the story, it was inspirational and beautiful and taught me a lot about flowers and the message they send out. (There’s even a very nice dictionary in the end of the book that I know I will go back to many times!). But there was something about it that I didn’t like and I can’t put my finger on what it is. It was a nice book, but I’m not sure that I will read it again.