A few months ago, I was invited to take part in a blog tour of the book Hothouse Flower by Margot Berwin. I debated about whether to take part because, though the book is about flowers, I really only wanted to review a book that evoked a sense of place. The book takes place in both New York City and on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, so I decided to give it a go.

Now that I’m finished, I have to say that this book really has to be one of the worst I’ve ever read. I’m sorry, but it’s true.

There, I said it. I’ve been dreading the words, but I have to be honest with you.

Here’s the thing: I can usually tough my way through a book I don’t really care for. But no book has ever literally put me to sleep. Twice.

The story is of a 32-year-old advertising copywriter who gets caught up with a variety of unsavory men in the search for nine valuable plants. I like the idea of the concept — woman pushes herself beyond her sense of comfort to find several interesting plants — but this woman is cliché and obnoxious, the men in the story are intimidating and manipulating, and the storyline is only interesting because of the plants.

Throughout the course of the book, I just couldn’t bring myself to side with Lila, the main character. The things she said and did were eye-rolling hokey and just in bad form. Her relationships, first with Exley and then with Diego, were so cheesy. The dialogue is only as good as a B movie, and the sex scenes were hysterical at best. Samples from the text:

“I unbuttoned the first three buttons of his shirt and pressed my face against his chest, where the hair was soft as summer grass.”

“He made love to me slowly. Climbing his way in, rooting himself, planting himself inside of me, like he was going backward in time.”

Gag me with a wooden spoon.

In general, I found the dialogue to be very contrived and unrealistic. There were several times I found myself thinking that people didn’t actually talk like that.

Regarding the sense of place, I love the fact that several of the scenes in New York City take place in a laundromat that is essentially a jungle. The floor is covered with soft, mossy ground and butterflies and bees freely fly around this space, which has been turned from an industrial hub into a rain forest in the city.

The depictions of the Yucatan left me a bit mystified, however. In several scenes, Lila is walking or crawling through the rain forest, but the descriptions left me thinking of a stage set. It felt two-dimensional and made of flat, cardboard cut-out trees and animals. Imagine my surprise when I read that she’d gone seven miles through such a place and not just across the stage.

And the fact that the waters surrounding Mexico as “so electric blue it looked as if someone had dumped a vat of Ty-D-Bol in it” is simply insulting. When did the ocean become a gigantic toilet?

Despite all of the things that I didn’t like about this book, I have to say that there is one redeeming factor, and that is the flowers. Of all the things I was most hesitant about when I decided to read Hothouse Flower, it was the flowers I thought had the potential to bore me. Instead, I found them to be the most interesting aspect of the entire novel.

The whole book revolves around finding nine flowers, each of which represent the nine things human beings desire most: fortune, power, magic, knowledge, adventure, freedom, immortality, sex and love. Throughout the book, each flower is thoroughly described and its medicinal and natural properties are explained. It was fascinating to learn about how each type of flower was grown and why people find them appealing or helpful.

So there you go. Now, it might be just me, and perhaps you would feel differently about the book than I did (in fact, many people on the blog book review tour did like it). The good news is that you can give it a read yourself absolutely for free because TLC Book Tours has offered to give a copy of the book to one reader of this travel blog.

Here’s how you win: Help me choose some really outstanding fiction or narrative books related to travel that I can read and review on Kaleidoscopic Wandering. Simply leave a comment suggesting which books I should read. I’ll throw all the names in a hat and draw one lucky winner (located in the United States and Canada only) on October 31.

Note: There are affiliate links in this post.

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