Book review: The Language of Flowers, by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Complicated ideas inform The Language of Flowers, Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s debut novel, which is being released in the UK with all the hype and fanfare of a blockbuster movie. Despite those themes, like most blockbusters, this novel is entertaining, but not particularly nourishing.

It’s the story of Victoria, who’s grown up in a series of foster families and group homes. At 18 she is about to leave care and, hopefully, learn to care for herself. We flip back and forth in time, to a point, ten years earlier, when Victoria is living with Elizabeth, a wonderful foster mum who genuinely loves her, but who is troubled by ghosts from her own past that wreak havoc on their attempts to create a family together.

As a character, Victoria feels real, due, no doubt, to Diffenbaugh’s experience as a foster mother and carer. Victoria is edgy and often unlikable. She can’t bear being touched, and wonders whether she knows what it means to love. Most poignantly, she’s certain that she’s not worthy of receiving love. When the going gets tough, Victoria retreats into nature, the only place where she feels entirely at home. Attuned to planetary rhythms, Victoria is fluent in the lost language of flowers, a relic of the Victorian age, when much had to be said without speaking. So, for example, snapdragons symbolise presumption, peonies anger, and moss maternal love.

Victoria expresses herself through blooms, rather than words, and finds work with a florist, where she excels at “solving” customers’ tricky love tangles by crafting bouquets that “speak” to the specific problem. At the flower market where they buy supplies, she encounters an intriguing young man who’s not only fluent in the language of flowers, but turns out to have links to her past.

I have no doubt of Diffenbaugh’s sincerity in wanting to explore the question of nature versus nurture, or the idea of family itself – the one you are born into, versus the one you make. But the best parts of Diffenbaugh’s novel concern the flowers. Whereas the plot is cheese, the use she makes of flower-speak is original and captured my imagination. In fact, I found the mini dictionary at the back more interesting than the actual novel.

While Diffenbaugh’s to be admired for not making Victoria a household saint, this novel, with its gooey fairy-tale ending, is more cherry blossom (impermanence) and violet (modest worth) than gentian (intrinsic worth) and laurel (glory and success).