A Victorian Flower Dictionary: The Language of Flowers Companion Author: Visit Amazon's Mandy Kirkby Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0345532864 | Format: PDF
A Victorian Flower Dictionary: The Language of Flowers Companion Description
About the Author
Mandy Kirkby is an editor and a flower enthusiast. She lives in Cambridge, England.
- Hardcover: 192 pages
- Publisher: Ballantine Books (September 20, 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 9780345532862
- ISBN-13: 978-0345532862
- ASIN: 0345532864
- Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
I recently finished reading Vanessa Diffenbaugh's novel "The Language of Flowers." The plot is both complicated and simplistic: a young girl who has been raised in the foster care system is crippled emotionally by repeated rejections. She pronounces herself an unloveable throw-away that has little hope of sustaining any type of meaningful relationship. Her love of all things floral affords her the ability to use flowers to communicate in an almost metaphysical code that finds root within the hearts and desires of the men and women to whom she sells her blooms. Like Tilo in The Mistress of Spices: A Novel, Victoria understands what her patients need but cannot help herself. Throughout the story, she uses flowers to speak for her and eventually compiles a compendium of flower photographs with their meanings. In "A Victorian Flower Dictionary," Mandy Kirkby presents a book of fifty flowers, complete with colored drawings of each bloom, the emotion it is meant to convey and a blurb that includes information about the plant itself and its citations in literature. In an appendix, she includes Vanessa Diffenbaugh's dictionary as compiled by Victoria, the fictional narrator of "The Language of Flowers." In as much as the book is nicely arranged as a sort of floral Wiki, I wonder how much of the language of flowers is subjective to the author of the dictionary.
In Samantha Gray's volume of the same theme and purpose, "The Secret Language of Flowers, many of the entries have different sentiments.
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