Suffice it to Say, We Often Find Ways to Communicate without a Lexicon.
Words have meanings but how does one communicate when they've never been given the words to communicate their feelings or to understand how someone feels? The young orphan girl in The Language of Flowers finds her love language and the best way for her to express and understand it from her journey through being adopted into foster care as a child. She goes through a host of homes and haphazardly finds family in Elizabeth, who loved, grew, and studied flowers and ultimately ends up teaching her from home. After her bout with Elizabeth, the orphan girl then grew to find extended family in Renata, an employer and mentor. She also finds her version of love in Grant who happens to be the nephew of her former foster mother. Her relationships with people are limited to her stringent ability to want to control the interaction. she learned by the age of ten that she had the innate ability to cause people to suffer. it stayed with and tortured her through her adulthood silently.Through her scant and sporadic relationships, her proclivities prove how she has control issues and suffers from alienation and insecurity. This is evident in her growing obsession with flowers, learning their habits and meanings, from her passive-aggressive method of relating to people, to her rejecting people who get closest to her including the father of her child. Since she has a propensity to cause havoc, isolate herself, and live a very self-centered life she often time puts herself in extreme positions when she could really just reach out for help with the web of support she has already around her.
She still has a strong personality; with her dramatic reactions and extreme actions she has a sense of independence so even though she has also been homeless and sleeping in the park among the flowers, she also ends up running a successful flower business, enough to sustain her minimalist lifestyle. Because of that she attracts good-meaning people to her but not knowing their additional purpose in her life she inevitably uses then abandons them.
This behavior and patterns are repeated with everyone who had gotten close to her therefore when she is giving birth at home, her employer's mother helped her deliver as she was too stubborn to go the hospital and had not spoken to the father the entire pregnancy on her own accord. However between the time of working for Renata and opening her own flower shop she meets a young lady named Marlena who was also home-schooled and had an affinity for flowers, was also home-schooled but, unlike herself, had more motherly instincts. Unlike Marlena, how she cares for her own baby is done so in an aloof way if she isn't ailing herself trying to be overly present. The extremes on which she was operating enabled her to leave the child alone in the shop and living quarters to get baby formula to give her breasts time to heal from feeding so much and then again to get some sleep in the park she once called home.
Her story is being told from a first-person narrative but from the perspective of her present day as well as her memories of childhood. The character's choices and antics are frustrating but her redemption is the pinnacle. In the present time, she walks us through how she chose the perfect flower/plant to line her daughter's small baby basket with because she had made the decision to no longer keep her; she decorates her baby's basket with moss and laid her inside. She took the baby to Grant, her father, while he was not home and left her wrapped in a mother's love. As she left she begins to recall a memory that involved arson, secrets, & lies. Throughout her narrating her life and her stories of recollection we see She has this issue with feeling unforgivably flawed and runs from everyone. She articulates her emotions through flowers. It's the best way to honestly communicate them. After making a confession that changed her life and the people around her. what she wants is to be forgiven, what she wants is to make amends, and to finally feel connected and part of a family.
Overall the book is good even though it isn't personally relatable. The story of a young white girl that didn't grow up initially privileged but still managed to redeem herself while intentionally being a fuck up has a tinge of intrinsic entertainment in it. I'll give it a 5 out of 7.
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