The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart
Holly Ringland
Published 2018
Harper Collins Australia
🌸🌸🌸
This is a contemporary women’s fiction story set in Australia, about a young woman finding herself after escaping an abusive father. It was Audible’s book of the month a while back, and got turned into a TV series featuring Sigourney Weaver, so I decided to give it a go, listening mostly while gardening. No, I didn’t learn anything useful about flowers. It took me a very long time to finish because it’s slow, depressing and quite boring with perhaps the most frustrating main character I have ever encountered.
When Alice is nine, she loses her whole family in a fire, and is taken in by her estranged grandmother June, who raises her on her remote flower farm alongside a group of women who have all escaped abusive relationships and found peace. June has her own issues, and when her attempts to protect the naive teen backfire, Alice runs away to the desert and another isolated community, and finds that passionate love comes at a price.
This is probably a good book but I didn’t enjoy it. There’s way too much domestic abuse and broken females making stupid choices again and again for my taste. Alice is infuriatingly passive, self centred and blinkered. Maybe this is because of her childhood trauma but it wasn’t fun to read about and it goes on for far too long. The narration was good and the cover gorgeous though, and it’s been a bestseller, so clearly others enjoyed it much more than me.
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