Customer Comments

Cheryl Strayed's advice is tender, honest, and absolutely spot on. Less than a collection of columns about particular situations, it's more a book about how to pick yourself up and go on in the midst of loss, confusion, and occasionally horror. This was the book my partner and I brought on vacation and read together in bed, with happy tears at the world Strayed creates and shares. It's a world of pet names and the tenderest of ass-kickings, with enough personal revelations so the reader knows from whence she speaks. A hard-won view of the world as wrenching and beautiful and always worth embracing.

A luminous, touching book. Like my last year's favorite, Room, The Language of Flowers is a bittersweet novel--painful and sad, but ultimately hopeful. Diffenbaugh's main character is a girl who has aged out of the foster care system with no support system and no motivation beyond getting through. What she does have is a profound love for flowers, and the Victorian language whereby people communicated through them, and an intuitive, empathetic understanding of people and their deepest hopes and desires. Through this combination, she finds a place in the world where her knowledge makes a difference in people's lives, and this gives her the strength to examine her own.

This was just a phenomenal book. I couldn't put it down, and found myself reading snatches of it at red lights. While the premise seems horrific, the narration by a five year old boy keeps it from being terribly graphic. Instead, one is left with an incredibly detailed world created by a mother to save the soul of her son, and probably her own as well. Hopeful and tragic at once, it's a story that will burn it's way into your brain and leave you longing that its characters are able to make it in the real world.