There’s something to be said for finding an oasis to the noise and the horror spinning itself round and round the news ticker tape. The Alchemy of Flowers, the adult debut from Laura Resau, is exactly that, providing a place of quiet and healing within its gates for both its characters and readers.
Eloise has left her whole life in the U.S. behind for a strange job offer in France. It’s true that “gardener” on a large estate isn’t a strange job, but the requirements for the job, and the rules she’ll be expected to follow once she’s in the estate’s locked gates, make it just bizarre enough that she feels like it could heal her broken heart. There, among the paradisiacal flowers, trees, and waterways, she meets the bubbly Mina, the thoughtful Bao, and the impossibly handsome Rafael, all with their own responsibilities within the garden. After running from years of infertility, multiple pregnancy loss, and the breakup of her marriage, Eloise is sure this is the place to finally find her footing again.
Of course, nothing can be that simple. Eloise starts noticing small footprints in the mud by the river, and has a sense that she’s being watched through the trees. Is it the three ghostly figures that tread through the gardens each dusk, or just snippets of dreams made manifest from whatever enchantment binds the estate? The more Eloise tries to understand these strange phenomena, the more danger she finds herself of being thrust out, or worse.
The Alchemy of Flowers is steeped so strongly with enchantment that it left my own world feeling a little more shimmery each time I closed the book. Resau’s descriptions are lush, making the scent of jasmine or lavender, the feel of a refreshing stream, or the taste of Mina’s cooking almost come off the page (or, in my case, my phone screen). From the book description, you know Eloise gets a little more than just healing out of this arrangement, and from Rafael’s introduction on the page you know he’s Eloise’s unintentional love interest, but Resau manages to keep this eventual pairing feeling sweet, not cheesy. Perhaps most importantly, it’s wonderful seeing Eloise heal, and seeing the positive effect every difficult ounce of her own healing has on the fellow heartbroken around her. In that way, Alchemy was everything I could have asked for in our strange time.
All that healing and good vibes could make a book flounder under its own sweetness, but the mystery of whether Eloise and the gang is as alone in the garden as they’re supposed to be gives a more pressing undercurrent to the story. Just like a rose, the beauty of the garden holds a sharp underside. The danger Eloise flirts with much more intentionally than she does Rafael brings a welcome shadow, and secures the stakes of how much she has to lose if she’s wrong, or if she has lost her mind in this lovely new life of hers. How much the others know, too, brings a sense of doubt to the tender community ties forming between them, even as they all do grow closer and begin resembling less a group of coworkers and more a family of misfits and brokenhearted.
The end of Alchemy brings the preservation of this new little found family a battle of wills, and, eventually, more literal blows. The threat that seems a disembodied shadow is much more corporeal in a way that feels like it has figuratively stepped out of the enchanted garden we’ve spent so many pages enjoying. I knew a showdown was coming between the rule-maker and our main characters, but I expected something slower, something subtler and maybe more metaphorical than the fight and blood that came instead. While it isn’t a bad sequence of events that leads to the eventual ending, it’s also one that doesn’t feel like it belongs to the slow and quiet nature of the rest of the book. It feels like a flower that doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the bouquet.
The rest of that bouquet, though, is pretty enough to distract from its odd little part, altogether becoming something soft and happy and perfect for plunging into while swaying in a hammock on some late-summer day.
(I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.)
Ring Reads 