Book #17: The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

The book club I just joined is reading this book, which is the main reason why I picked it up. The main character of the book is Victoria, who was a foster child and who has serious attachment issues. She spent her childhood bouncing around between 32 different foster homes, and the story starts as she ages out of the group home she was living in, and she becomes homeless. But she has this magical ability to do flower arrangements and she manages to get a job at a flower shop, and people fall in love with her flowers. She believes in the flowers and how each flower means something specific (according to the meanings of flowers in the Victorian age, very kitschy of the author to name her Victoria) and somehow her meaningful flower arrangements make people fall in love. She begins to have relationships with people and tries to overcome her natural desires to leave every relationship she has before she gets hurt. There are flashbacks every other chapter to Victoria's last foster parent, who she had a wonderful relationship with and loved, but you just knew something bad happened to ruin their relationship since she didn't end up there, and I felt like I was reading the whole time waiting for the hammer to fall.

I felt like Diffenbaugh was asking us to suspend a lot of disbelief by saying that Victoria was this magical flower arranger (knowing the meaning of flowers doesn't = amazing flower arrangements automatically) and that she immediately had this huge flower business after she started one. But overall, I really liked the part of the story dealing with flowers and how she handled them and made her flower dictionary; that was the fun part of the story.

[SPOILER ALERTS FOLLOW]: I just hated, hated, hated how depressing the main story of the book was. Victoria's history in the whole foster care system is super depressing to think about--I follow a blogger who writes about foster parenting and the sadness of it all really is hard to take. So I know this is real life for some people/kids, but oh man, it is really sad to think of them turning out like this. I also really, really hated how she got pregnant and gave away her baby. I cannot read those sorts of things while thinking about my own babies and all the real babies who are treated poorly. I was BLASTING through those chapters, just skimming and getting the main ideas, because I did not want to wallow in thinking about that. I knew that it would end up happy at the end, and it does, everyone reunited in almost too easy of a fashion, but I hated it still. I feel like a spoiled, privileged rich kid saying that I don't want to read about sad hard life stuff like that, but I don't. Particularly when it has to do with little kids or babies.

I do feel a lot of interest in looking into the foster system to be foster parents sometime, though. I feel like that is possibly the best place for service, the best one-on-one sort of service you can give to a child, although I don't think I would want to do it until we were done having our own babies. If the fictional Victoria had had one nice family try to take her in, she could have lived such a different, more secure life. And there are too many kids living in the same situation in our world. Maybe someday.