The Language of Flowers / by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Life hasn't been all roses for Victoria Jones. Dumped at an orphanage by her birth mother, she's bounced around the foster care system her where she's learned to live hard and act tough. Though never much good at school and certainly not one to get along well with others, there is one thing Victoria has become very, very good at--flowers. A fascination born from spending years alone outdoors, Victoria self-educated herself on the world of flora, having learned by heart all of the different kinds of bulbous, long-stemmed and pollen carrying as well as learning to distinguish even the slightest differences between everything from geraniums to snapdragons and azaleas to tulips, even maintaining a slapshod garden of potted plants out of halved milk gallon containers. Now at the point of "aging out" on her eighteenth birthday, Victoria's more or less relegated to a life on the street where she's taken living (and gardening) in the city park. By chance when she aids a woman loading boxes of plants into her car, Victoria maneuvers her way into a job as an assistant florist where her gifts and most importantly her passions are put to good use.

A great novel about the beauty of nature offsetting the harshness of humanity, The Language of Flowers explores the importance of having a place and the significance of relationships within the families we make for ourselves. Victoria's not an especially secure person when she's first introduced, very much the tormented soul. It's not hard to see why as the narrative toggles back and forth between Victoria's life as a new adult and her girlhood a decade earlier. And yet the story may be that much more poetic for it. As Victoria learns from her boss the "language of flowers", how certain types of flowers can communicate various emotions from giver to receiver, she steadily begins to find her own place in the world. (FIC DIFFENBA)

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky / by Heidi W. Durrow

The biological daughter of a black American GI stationed in Germany and a Danish mother, Rachel Morse is still a child when she arrives to live with her grandmother and auntie in Portland, OR. She's an orphan now. Her grandmother's become her sole guardian following the disappearance of her father and the tragic death of her mother. They make the best of it though in their modest but happy home. Grandma, Aunt Loretta and Rachel get along well, stick up for one another and face trials as a family. It's just out in the world that things are tricky. Rachel's always known she's different, but its the kids at school who make sure just how much she knows it. A biracial girl with light skin and blue eyes, Rachel's the subject of endless taunts from the other, predominately black classmates. It's other women too, grown women from the community who more subtly make note of Rachel's physical distinctions. Her looks can't hide her vivacious personality and Rachel can't help but treat others with kindness. But just being nice can't turn enemies into friends, especially when fonder attention from male classmates compound her peers animosity and generally confuse the situation further.
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The Girl Who Fell From The Sky was one of the better breakthrough novels of the year. And it's not hard to see why. It's a brilliant expose on race, identity and conflict, examining the world from a child's eyes but also from the perspective of others involved in the oddly arranged caste system of mixed race individuals. Rachel is a great protagonist, but Durrow does the wise thing by paying close attention to the peripheral characters, even ones removed from the central story who observe many of the same circumstances yet in a different, more subtly reserved light. If the novel has a weakness, it's that it can't hide from the truth, and likewise from conflict. At the beginning all is known is that Rachel's father has abandoned her and that her mother has had a fatal accident. But as the narrative weaves together the missing pieces of just what happened, things become more sinister as the real message of the story deftly comes to the forefront, exploiting a tragic flaw in our society. (FIC DURROW)

CHILDREN UNDERGROUND (DVD)

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Sleeping in subway tunnels around Bucharest are the casualties of a fallen era. Disposed of, disheveled and drug-dependent, they're among the 30,000+ homeless children of post-communist Romania. 'Children' is no exaggeration, either, with kids aged 3 or 4 routinely cohabitating with 'elder' youths; mutually sharing scrounged-for food fragments, cardboard boxes, clothing and paint-thinner. The state being woefully ill-equipped to face things, the problem has essentially become part of the scenery, a permanent fixture on the post-socialist landscape.

For a period of three months, German director Edet Belzberg and a low-budget film crew monitored a handful of subway children, carefully divulging the origin and reason for each's displacement and examining the bitter reality of the mostly ineffectual attempts at intervention. In typical intrusive fashion the camera preserves the excruciating innocence of each child who, amidst the backdrop of a broader world, remains painfully unaware of their surroundings. 'Susceptibility' doesn't begin to describe their plight. Life's not so much day-to-day as it is moment-by-moment with their turbulent existence only perpetuated by hunger, disease, ignorance and brutality. Every instance, every confrontation, every awkward image of normal life drifting past is brilliantly captured by Belzberg, leaving the audience without a doubt that each kid is still just a kid, inhabiting a perversely distorted world of confusion, desperation and neglect.