You Should Read THE ALCHEMY OF FLOWERS by Laura Resau
Reading Notes
Last year, around this time, I craved brightness in my life. The end of a particularly trying school year brought excitement, yes, but also exhaustion, and reviving my outdoor space seemed necessary. I filled the back of my car with flowers and spent a morning situating them in planters and pots. They were gorgeous until, well, they weren’t.
Despite my desire to be a gardener, I have no talent in that area. If I’m not overwatering plants, then I’m forgetting about them altogether. Combined with the Colorado sun, which has a tendency to be overzealous, flowers and vegetables don’t thrive at my house.
Nothing like a trunk full of flowers to get summer started
I have absolutely no good advice for maintaining a garden, but I can recommend a book that will transport you to Le Château du Paradis, a garden in the South of France enchanting enough to make you forget all the dead flowers in your past.
In Laura Resau’s forthcoming novel The Alchemy of Flowers, thirty-seven-year-old Eloise’s life resembles the bed of strawberries my dogs trampled last year. She’s reeling from years of infertility followed by a recent divorce. When she finds a mysterious ad in a gardening magazine that requests an “impossible task riddle” and “a résumé of ashes,” Eloise decides to abandon her life in Denver and to travel to the Gardens of Paradise (45).
Magic and mystery pervade the walled gardens. Mina, Bao, and Raphaël are the only other residents on the estate, which belongs to the never-glimpsed La Patronne and is overseen by the strangely cold Antoinette. La Patronne makes odd requests, such as banning children from the premises and requiring employees to stay indoors at dusk. As Raphaël explains to Eloise, “Until half a century ago, a secretive family owned the estate. . . . There were a series of disappearances and deaths, and then La Patronne took over” (48).
Curious things begin to happen. Eloise sees white-clad figures roaming the garden, and unfamiliar objects appear in her living space. A market vendor tells her, “If you ask me, someone’s playing games over there, pretending to be a goddess. And using those plants to play with one’s mind, if you know what I mean” (228). When Eloise questions the others, she’s told to ignore the bizarre happenings and simply follow the rules.
At first, the charming setting makes it easy for her to play along:
“Fairy lights glowed through the trees, pulling me to the edge of a clearing. In the center sat a round table, lit by candles and set with pottery plates and wooden utensils and vases of feathery ferns, steaming pots and pitchers of water and bottles of wine. Lanterns hung from cedar and pine branches. A one-room stone kitchen, its windows yellow against the darkness, was tucked into the trees. I peered through the doorway at an old-fashioned stove, breathed in the scent of spiced stew.”
Meals in Paradise are as alluring as the surroundings.
But Eloise has followed the rules for her entire life, and the pursuit has left her unsatisfied. She reflects, “Most of my adult life had been about withholding every indulgence, tempering every pleasure—daily sacrifices for something monumental that never came to pass” (29). As unsettling occurrences accumulate, Eloise finds herself unable to stick to La Patronne’s expectations. It’s only as she pushes against the rules that she begins to heal herself.
It’s a lesson we all need to learn, especially women. The other day I told a friend about a sticker chart I had as a kid. I think it was meant to track the nights I went without sucking my fingers. I know my reward for filling it was an Oopsie Daisy doll. Leave it to the ‘90s to tell girls we could be anything while also selling us toys that crawled across the floor, fell over, and then cried at us. By turning “playing” into “mothering, the makers of Oopsie Daisy, Waterbabies1, and similar dolls told us what role we were meant to inhabit when we were older. They also insisted that role would be fun—and when, years later, it turned out to be very, very hard, the guilt was as real as those dolls were fake.
As Eloise discovers, despite societal pressure, a woman never plays only one role: “We would find a way to live in harmony in these gardens. We, of course, meaning the Triple Goddess inside and outside of myself, in all her forms” (235). The Alchemy of Flowers is a book about being open to possibilities and embracing different (often contrary) aspects of yourself.
I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to keep anything alive that doesn’t actively whine at me to feed it, but any time I’m longing for some enchantment, I can return to Resau’s evocative writing. Whether your thumbs are green or brown or somewhere in between, you should read The Alchemy of Flowers, which comes out at the end of July. Thanks to Laura Pritchett, who first recommended this book to me!
The fate of most of my plants
Need-to-Know
Pub Date: July 29, 2025
Timeline: A summer
Length: 335 pages
Narrator: first-person POV of Eloise
Pairs Well With: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia; Three Keys by Laura Pritchett; dinner under fairy lights; an enchanted treehouse
Book Club
What rules, both written and unwritten, do you most want to break? Why? Which ones are you scared of breaking? What might happen if you challenged them anyway?
In Le Château du Paradis, Eloise and her friends eat decadent meals. Even the atmosphere has the taste and texture of food: “The Mediterranean light felt lemony and creamy, a whipped dessert you could spoon onto your tongue” (38). What would your paradise look like? Would you retreat to a garden like Eloise, or would you seek out the open horizon from a beach? What about your chosen location calls to you?
Close Reading
As Eloise and Raphaël wait out a storm, the boundary between Eloise and the natural world blurs:
“From my spot by the window, I only half listened. It wasn’t just the storm distracting me. Flowers were whispering, but I couldn’t grasp their meaning. Their tone was frantic. Maybe they felt distressed out there in the elements, being flattened and smashed and drowned, poor things. Or were they warning me of something? Their voices reminded me of their warnings in the shower at twilight. But I was inside now, breaking no rules.”
Although Eloise is safe, she feels afraid. Because she spends her days tending to the flowers, she can’t help but empathize with them as the rain pummels their fragile petals. To talk herself out of her fear, she reminds herself that she is “breaking no rules.” This thought is ironic, though, because by following La Patronne’s rules will come to mean disregarding her own desires and moral code. Part of Eloise’s character arc involves challenging expectations.
This scene also symbolizes the way our modern sensibilities tend to disconnect us from nature. Eloise believes she is safe not only because she is “breaking no rules” but also because she is “inside.” Resau’s book encourages us to consider the harm we may be causing as a society by designating “outside” as dangerous simply because it is the opposite of “inside.”
Creative Writing
Fiction: Forget characters, plot, or setting. Start with a list of rules. Create five to ten rules, as arbitrary and specific as you want. Once you have these in place, write yourself into a character who wants to break as many as possible. Why do they want to break them? Who created the rules? What will happen if your character follows them?
Nonfiction: Eloise’s journey to France starts back in Denver, when she runs into her ex-husband and his girlfriend. Write about an uncomfortable or awkward encounter you’ve experienced. First, record it as it happened. Then, rewrite it the way you wish it had gone. Finally, compare the two versions and reflect on what they reveal about you. How have you changed and grown since this encounter?
Sentence Study
Dashes are most often used to show an interruption in thought or to set off an aside, but this sentence is a great example of using a dash to connect two independent clauses when the second builds on the first. Each clause has a single subject-predicate pair (“Les Dames Blanches weren’t” and “they were”). Resau could have placed a period between them to create two simple sentences. The dash, however, functions like an arrow. I envision it like a neon sign in Vegas, pointing from “ghosts” to “they,” calling our attention to the connection between them. Wait, there’s more, the dash seems to say. It’s an effective way to increase the suspense a notch.
The second clause also follows with a list of infinitives (the “to” is only attached to the first verb, “make,” but it’s implied with “throw,” “stab,” “leave,” and “write”). By its nature, an infinitive is full of possibility because it hasn’t yet happened. It’s always about to be, which gives Les Dames Blanches the power to cause even more harm for Eloise and her friends in Le Château du Paradis.
