Victoria Smith was abandoned as an infant and has lived in over a dozen foster home situations. She is a very troubled, injured child who cannot adapt well and is mostly down-right mean. When she was nine, she lived with, and was almost adopted by a woman named Elizabeth who was looking to create a family for her own reasons. Victoria let her guard down with Elizabeth, learning about flowers, growing them, cultivating them and their special language. When the adoption fell through, she reverts to her old angry, suspicious ways. Turned out of the foster care system at eighteen, Victoria finds she is unable to live in the group home setting and plants a garden in a San Francisco park where she finds solace and a place to sleep. A local florist, Renata, sees something in Victoria and tentatively offers her a job. As Victoria proves herself a capable, talented and intuitive florist, she begins to emerge from herself and slowly finds a place in the world. When her past with Elizabeth collides with her present, she fights with the only mechanisms she knows how, flight and shutting people out. Slowly, she realizes there is someone in her life who needs her attention more than she and she once again struggles to make a place in the world for herself. Victoria is not a likable, nor sympathetic main character, but she will get under your skin and not let go, though she will often make you want to shake some sense in her. Elizabeth is another character hard to understand, but whose story is slowly revealed. Renata offers kindness when necessary and a brisk, no nonsense personality when warranted. Vanessa Diffenbaugh, a foster mother herself, uses flowers and their language as a metaphor for families and how they can be created in many different ways. Book groups will find a lot of discussion material in these pages.
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