The Flower Sisters
Summer 1978. Fifteen-year-old Daisy, abandoned by her drifting mother Violet in the sleepy town of Possum Flats, Missouri, is left with her grandmother, Rose Flowers, the town’s mortician. Bored to tears, Daisy talks her way into an internship at the town newspaper where she learns of a tragic dance hall fire nearly fifty years earlier that killed 39 people. Through Daisy’s interviews with the reluctant survivors and their unspoken recollections, the author transports us to 1928, with the hopes, pleasures, and disappointments of the young people of that time, all of whom are marked by the violence that ripped the building apart.
Anderson sets a light tone in Daisy’s first interaction with her grandmother’s profession, as the corpse of a former mayor arrives still in a state of excitement from his death in flagrante. Through Daisy’s eyes we see a cast of quirky small-town septuagenarians whose grim narratives of the fire help her see not only the tragedy, but their lives as deeper than the “story.” The perspectives of different characters dominate each chapter so that the reader knows a great deal more than Daisy, our nominal tour guide.
The Flower women—Daisy’s grandmother and her mother—are wonderful creations, strong, conflicted characters; and I hope that in a future novel, Anderson will focus more deeply on women like them. The vagaries of their relationships with each other and with the town—why Rose remained in Possum Flats, why Violet escaped but never quite arrived anywhere else—are the real stories Daisy needs to uncover in order to truly understand where she is from.
