Contemporary fiction

The Language of Flowers

by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Eighteen-year-old Victoria Jones leaves the foster-care system distrustful of people but fluent in the Victorian meanings assigned to flowers. Her talent for creating bouquets earns her work with a florist and lets her communicate feelings she cannot express directly. A meeting at the flower market reconnects her with the one foster placement that once offered the possibility of family and with the damage that ended it. Beautiful and painful, this novel suits readers who enjoy floral symbolism, nonlinear stories, complicated adoption histories, guarded heroines, and redemptive fiction that treats attachment wounds as serious rather than easily cured.