THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS: VANESSA DIFFENBAUGH *****

I really liked this book though I might be called a SNAG (sensitive new age guy) for liking it.  I don't care.  I loved it, even bought flowers for my wife, will again.  And sent copies to my two sisters, both who love flowers, have great gardens.

This is the story of Victoria, orphaned at birth, a veteran of various foster families, none which kept her for long.  As the novel opens, she has just turned eighteen, old enough to leave her Group Home and be free for the first time in her life.  Meredith, her counselor, for the past 15 years, helps set her up in a month long stay in The Gathering House, where she can stay free for a month, then either pay rent or move out on her own.  She eventually leaves the home, finds a job working for Renata, at a florist shop, where she begins to make herself a new life, with her gift for flower arranging and giving the appropriate meaning to the flowers.  As she seems to be putting her life together, Diffenbaugh intersperses chapters from Victoria's earlier life, when she was eight years old and set to be adopted by Elizabeth, an independent woman, who works her own vineyard, teaches Victoria about flowers, about growing things, as well as how to love.  Both stories begin to turn and we know tragedy is not far down the road. The eighteen year old Victoria becomes pregnant, with Grant, ironically the son of Elizabeth's sister.  Refusing to receive help from anyone during her pregnancy and birth, she makes her life very difficult, and when she becomes sick from a bacteria while nursing the baby, she decides she's not a fit mother, someone who has never been able to love, and leaves the baby at Grant's house, and disappears, living once again on the street.  Similarly, as the day for her adoption by Elizabeth draws near, she fears Elizabeth will not love her, sets the vineyard on fire, as a way to keep her love. but eventually accuses Elizabeth of child abuse in the courts. Unable to love, mostly because she has never been loved, she ruins her chance to be part of a family and spends the next ten years in various foster homes, mostly unhappy.

We begin to sense, however, that though things have gone wrong in both instances, Victoria has been loved, by both Elizabeth and Grant, developed friendships and confidence, a result of working for Renata, starting her own flower business, and grown emotionally.   So towards the end, we are not surprised when she returns, tentatively, to Grant, to see her baby, and eventually to Elizabeth, where she is welcomed and we assumed loved by both the rest of her life.

And I found that the book has an index of flowers and their meanings, an added attraction to owning the book.