My Rating: 2.5
After her family suffers a tragedy, nine-year-old Alice Hart is forced to leave her idyllic seaside home. She is taken in by her grandmother, June, a flower farmer who raises Alice on the language of Australian native flowers, a way to say the things that are too hard to speak.
Under the watchful eye of June and the women who run the farm, Alice settles, but grows up increasingly frustrated by how little she knows of her family’s story. In her early twenties, Alice’s life is thrown into upheaval again when she suffers devastating betrayal and loss. Desperate to outrun grief, Alice flees to the dramatically beautiful central Australian desert. In this otherworldly landscape Alice thinks she has found solace, until she meets a charismatic and ultimately dangerous man.
I seem to be in the minority here, but I didn’t love this book. In fact, I didn’t even like it. None of the characters were particularly likable or easy to connect with. The ongoing, never-ending battles they faced — which were clearly meant to evoke sympathy — just left me feeling frustrated and detached. Their struggles never seemed to end, partly because of their own inane choices.
I was honestly shocked to learn that this story has been made into a movie. I suppose that’s one small mercy — at least all the pain and heaviness could be condensed into a couple of hours instead of the long, drawn-out process of reading the 400 page book.
The only thing I mildly enjoyed was the depiction of the Australian landscape. It was vivid and atmospheric, but sadly, not enough to redeem the overall reading experience.
In short, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart just wasn’t for me. If you’re drawn to dark, tragic family sagas, you might find something meaningful here — but for me, it was simply too heavy, too bleak, and too long.
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