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Your next favorite book
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by Stephanie Sy-Quia
It's the 1960s, and David is handsome, charismatic, and sworn to celibacy. An exemplary Catholic priest, devotion to God is all he's ever known, and all he ever thinks he will. In London, Margaret is adrift, healing from the loss of her parents and the end of a recent love affair. Increasingly drawn to the church, she sets out to join the new revolutions of sex and faith, taking up a teaching position at an all-girls school in David's diocese.
Decades later, Margaret is being cared for by her grandson, who has just discovered the strange truth of his family history. So begins the story of forbidden love and ardent faith, devotion and sacrifice, as the consequences of David and Margaret's unlikely union play out across generations. A first novel from an award-winning poet, A Private Man traces the exquisite love of two brilliant characters caught between passion and piety as they seek to usher the church they cherish into a more progressive era.
It is 1963 when Margaret Bendelow is hired to teach theology at a women's college in England. Her cognitive skill and understanding of theological complexities are exemplary. Her academic depth is noteworthy. At the beginning of her career, the future seems too far away to contemplate—she'll be awash in dementia in 2019. The present is where she thrives. Margaret is excited about her appointment until she finds out she will be under the supervision of someone named Father Fletcher. She resents having to prove her credibility when she has studied at Regina Mundi, a college that teaches laywomen theology.
The shaping of Margaret as a woman of wit and lofty dreams, of desires and frustrations, is the complicated task Stephanie Sy-Quia eagerly takes on, inspired by her grandparents' forbidden love story. Her first novel A Private Man builds its beautiful arc with both refined prose and character depth. Sy-Quia illustrates how Margaret is exhausted by the Catholic Church as a patriarchal institution, how it romanticizes devotion and prayer but diminishes service by women and female leadership; that's what she can't tolerate despite living her faith. After she arrives at the women's college she registers for the birth control pill, despite the doctor's bold stare at her empty ring finger, his eyes rebuking her as if she has already sinned, but Margaret refuses to be shamed about liking sex. The pill is social freedom.
The man overseeing her class, David Fletcher, is attractive and young, she guesses around forty years old. She has always been suspicious of attractive men but he has calluses on his hands that seem to imply he is familiar with physical labor.
David has been a priest for over a decade. For such a young man, his eyes are weary, though his strong voice carries easily in the wind. Beneath those marks of masculinity on his hands is a quiet loneliness, years in the making, from the war, and what he saw there, and from the sacrifices of the priesthood. Mostly, he trusts the company of men, assuming what he is feeling inside of himself is inside of them too, this unexplainable longing for the unknown and the road not taken.
On Margaret's first class day, David sits in the very back. She is a little late, her hair in a tidy bun, and the first thing she does is insist the students not stand when she enters the room. She advises them to call her Margaret and not Miss Bendelow.
"I am here to teach you theology. You do not know how lucky you are…Together we have the opportunity to study moral theology, dogmatics and the liturgy!... I have just come from Rome and let me tell you there is a revolution afoot."
"Father Fletcher and I will be meeting over the next few days," Margaret tells the students, "but the aim is to turn you out as thinking Catholics by the end of it."
If Margaret is surprised by her attraction to David, and his fascination with her, she doesn't let it dissuade her from her role as professor. But outside of class she and David are charmed by their Catholic differences.
Margaret converted to Catholicism during a terrible time—her mother died, her married lover, a man named Tristan, excitedly announced his wife was pregnant. Catholicism was the family religion of her best friend Nicole. Converting was an informed choice. She liked the order of Catholic rituals, their structure. Advent. Lent. Easter. The money Margaret inherited from her parents allowed her freedom to pursue her interests in Rome.
For David, Catholicism "was in him like marrow, he had drawn it all up, into all the coursing paths of his self." It "could never be rooted out." David has given everything up in his service to God and Margaret has given nothing up in her analytical devotion to God. Their burgeoning friendship can't expunge the gap between what being a Catholic priest cost him and what being a Catholic theologian anointed within her.
Their academic arguments about gender norms and the patriarchal foundation of the priesthood often annoy Margaret as she vehemently disagrees with David's rote answer "because the Apostles were men." An intellectual, with a spicy wit, Margaret explores the why of things and wants reasoned answers while David spouts out what he has learned in seminary without much thought. He is a priest by profession and by soul. Priests are conformists beholden to an ancient written text with passages burned in their memory. By nature, their valorization of the past is a professional ethic.
Margaret and David's conversations aren't exclusive to Catholicism. They discuss everything from wine to the Mediterranean to cherries. They dine together, smile at one another, and pretend their closeness lacks intimacy.
One of my favorite passages is when they spar over the marriage of priests. It is Margaret's amazing brain that quietly seduces David even as he argues that celibacy is the practical way for priests to practice sublimation (the transformation of desire). Margaret's response is humanistic. "Religion," she says, "gives us the concept of daily life, and a way of handling its tediums, and marriage is one of its great means. Marriage is a mode of witness, an epistemology. To bar people from marriage is to prevent them from this way of knowing."
"Knowing" is such an interesting word. It's rooted in identity and you see that here, where the older version of Margaret suffers cognitive decay; she can't know yesterday and her self-worth plummets. The younger Margaret knows history, truth, theology, and life but can't know tomorrow, which feeds into her curious spirit and adventurous nature. The question the novel asks of its readers travels much deeper, however: can Margaret know love when it falls, accidentally, outside traditional boundaries?
As I was reading A Private Man I wondered if it was secular enough considering certain audiences are uncomfortable with religious frameworks. Novels have this amazing ability to transcend our regular lives but the introduction of religious themes, for some, is reductive. But I found the Catholic framing of the novel intriguing. I am not Catholic and it allowed me entrance into a room that is normally closed off. I loved the passage where Margaret is studying at Regina Mundi and she is in the washroom doing laundry when a bundle of vestments arrives. What is a chore is also an art, a duty of love.
"Quickly, the most senior washerwoman was called over, to take it on. Margaret watched as she laid the garment flat on a worktable, filled a small basin with the mildest water, got out a fresh bar of soap from a box high on a shelf, lined with glassine paper, then spread the chasuble over her knees and dabbed at the stains."
There is a difference between an easy read and a quick read. A Private Man is neither. As a novel, it asks for time. It asks its readers to live within its breathable boundaries of religion and absence. The writing is so beautiful the last thing you want to do is rush through it and yet you want to rush through it to see if David abandons the priesthood because he is in love with Margaret more than he is in love with the Church. The emotional weight of the secularity—God can be love, but love can also be love—registers quietly. Stephanie Sy-Quia has built a world within a world that readers enter and don't want to leave, that is partly biographical, and perhaps that's why it feels so personal, and that's why I read it one more time before ordering it for my mother, an Episcopal priest.
Book reviewed by Valerie Morales
The magnificent rose windows of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris are considered masterpieces of engineering for their artistic beauty, mathematical precision, and structural stability. Amazingly, the windows remained intact after the debilitating Paris fire of 2019.
The windows were created for medieval viewers, many of whom were illiterate. They were visual homilies that communicated faith, love, and salvation. They were glass books telling the story of Christ and his mother. The rose shape of the windows (a Gothic design for churches widespread in Europe) was circular to represent Christ as eternal. When the sun is at its highest point, the cathedral's interior is alight in colors with the message that God's radiance is the source of all light and salvation.
The windows were a collaboration under the supervision of cathedral architects Jean de Chelles and Pierre de Montreuil but were largely the work of anonymous glaziers and artisans who specialized in stained glass.
The North Rose Window was created around 1250 and is the only rose window to maintain most of its original 13th-century glass. In the center, the Virgin Mary is holding the Christ Child. Around them are prophets, kings, judges, familiar people of the Old Testament. It is colored in striking blues.
The South Rose Window is also referred to as the "midday rose." It was donated by Saint Louis (King Louis IX of France), and built in 1260. It measures about the same size as the North Rose Window, nearly 42 feet in diameter. Both the North and South windows have around 80 panes of glass spread across multiple concentric circles. The Last Judgement is the theme of the South window, with Christ in the center surrounded by angels and images of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. Its colors include intense reds. The South Rose Window has had significant color stability issues and has had to repeatedly be restored.
The West Rose Window is the smallest, around 31 feet in diameter, and is in the cathedral's front façade. It was completed around 1225 and none of the original glass remains. It illustrates the Madonna and Child. The first circle represents the 12 tribes of Israel. The 12 signs of the zodiac associated with the labors of the months of the year make up the lower half of the window.
In the novel A Private Man, the female protagonist, Margaret Bendelow, becomes agitated by the possibility that the rose windows of Notre-Dame Cathedral were destroyed after the terrible Paris fire. Margaret, when she was younger, was a religious scholar, but dementia has picked apart her brain, creating instability. Her loving grandson Adrian bikes to see her every Wednesday despite the difficulty of witnessing her belligerence and rage. The day after the Paris fire, he brings with him the local papers and puts them onto her lap so she can see the damage. Margaret grabs Adrian's wrist in desperation.
"What of the windows? What has happened to the rose windows…The ones from the thirteenth century. The works of Jean de Chelles and Pierre de Montreuil. The largest rose windows in Europe?"
The passage continues: She releases his wrist and brings her hand up over her eyes, and begins to cry. The sound of her sobs lags, and then rasps out drily. She is shaking.
Margaret is aghast at the thought that replacement windows might be fireproofed. The radiant glaze and how light filters through the cathedral would be affected. It would be one more example of the world losing its past as Margaret is losing her memories. The stained glass windows of the cathedral offer her hope with their collective stories of sacrifice and salvation. Their brilliant filtered light is confirmation that the darkest moments of her life are temporary. Dawn is coming. In other words, the Latin phrase that symbolizes Margaret Bendelow and her beloved rose windows: Fluctuat nec mergitur.
She is tossed by the waves but does not sink.
Top to bottom:
North Rose Window by Krzysztof Mizera (2008), CC BY-SA 4.0
South Rose Window by David Bordes / CMN (2024), Licence Ouverte 1.0
West Rose Window by Zairon (2017), CC BY-SA 4.0
by Veronica Roth
Elegy Ahn did not ask for destiny to find her.
She is happy with her life as a soldier, defending her small country from the Talusar, a powerful nation who worships a deadly Fever. A fever that blesses half of its victims with mysterious gifts.
But then she's summoned to hear a prophecy–her, and the most ruthless of Talusar generals, Rava Vidar. Brought face to face, they learn that one of them will lead their people to victory over the other…but they don't know which. And at the center of both of their fates: a man. A man that, Elegy is told, she will fall in love with.
In just one day, Elegy's old life–her job, her purpose, and her future–is over. She and Rava are destined to collide, with the fate of their nations hanging in the balance. And when they do, only one will be left standing.
Elegy intends to make sure it's her.
Life has always been a bit different for twenty-something Elegy Ahn, the protagonist of Veronica Roth's latest novel, Seek the Traitor's Son. Her mother is the Sword of Cedre, the nation's military leader, and her father is a bounty hunter, so she's been trained in combat and in the culture of the enemy Talusar empire. Elegy and her mother don't get along, to put it mildly, and so she's more than content to ignore her famous heritage, make her own name as a search and rescue soldier, and spend time with her husband. But then a prophecy upends Elegy's world: The augurs, who can see the future, declare that in the war between Cedre and Talusar, it will be either Elegy or a brutal Talusar general named Rava Vidar who will lead their people to victory. Elegy is deemed the Hope of Cedre and Theren Forint, the son of a Talusar exile, is chosen to be her Knight (her sworn bodyguard).
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Seek the Traitor's Son is the worldbuilding, which is an intriguing blend of science fiction and fantasy—there are Knights on horseback and magic and sword fights, but also spaceships and holograms and interactions with an alien planet. The novel takes place in the distant future, in which arose the Fever, a sort of magical biological weapon: a virus that kills everyone but resurrects half of the infected after a few days and grants them supernatural abilities, like the ability to see through time or into the minds of others. One segment of the remaining population, which became the Talusar empire, came to revere the Fever as a god; the other, which became the Cedre nation, feared the devastation and chose to isolate itself on what was once the International Space Station. For years they have been locked in a war for control of Earth.
This is the context in which Elegy encounters the prophecy and her new, not quite welcome role. After Theren is named her Knight, a brutal attack kills both Elegy's husband and her mother, leaving Elegy grief-stricken, and Theren is captured by the enemy. It isn't until four years later that Elegy and Theren reunite and must navigate the history and guilt between them, and also the question of Elegy's fate: Is she truly destined to lead the Cedre people in taking back Earth, or will Rava Vidar lead the Talusar to victory?
The perspective switches between Elegy and Theren, whose unique background—his mother came from the empire and taught him about her homeland and how to fight in order to help in his future role as a Knight—sheds new light on the Talusar empire for the reader. Seeing the world through both Elegy's and Theren's eyes allows the reader to understand both cultures, and sides of the war, without necessarily siding with either. Theren is a skilled fighter, violent in battle, but also gentle and a patient teacher; years of being forced into subservience have made him observant and quick to obey, but also kind and determined. Elegy is initially a happily married, seasoned soldier with mommy issues, but the death of her husband leaves her grieving and reeling; she takes up bounty hunting rather than return to the miliary and tries to ignore the prophecy. Over the course of the novel, both Elegy and Theren learn to deal with their grief and guilt, and figure out how to act around each other. A third main character, whose perspective comes later in the novel, lends an additional, surprising dimension to the story, as well as some unexpected twists.
The conflict between fate and choice is a major theme of Seek the Traitor's Son. For Elegy, the prophecy has stolen away her choices: her choice of who she will love, her choice of whether or not to fight, her choice of remaining herself or becoming someone bigger. As circumstances change, however, so does Elegy's view of the prophecy, and she begins to see that it has given her purpose. Many stories about prophecies explore this conflict between fate and choice, forcing characters to make their own choices within the parameters of their fate, but interestingly, Roth has put her protagonist in a situation in which her destiny, while foreseen, remains unclear—Rava Vidar may yet be the victor of which the prophecy spoke—meaning that Elegy's hard-won choices may be for nothing. How should, or must, Elegy act under these circumstances? And who will be the ultimate victor in this war? Seek the Traitor's Son, the first book in a planned duology, doesn't resolve all questions and plot points—although the sequel promises a satisfying resolution to the prophecy and a continuation of the slow-burn romance between Elegy and Theren—but it is a satisfying read anyway, with rich characters and shocking twists.
Book reviewed by Jordan Lynch
Veronica Roth's latest novel, Seek the Traitor's Son, is a dystopian fantasy featuring extensive character development, a mysterious prophecy, and deep explorations of grief and guilt. Roth is an old hand at writing dystopian novels: she began drafting the dystopian YA novel Divergent in the early 2000s when she was a senior at Northwestern University. The debut was published in 2011, in the middle of the Hunger Games era of popular dystopian novels, and immediately landed on one of the New York Times bestseller lists; the book remained on one bestseller list or another for 47 weeks. By 2013, the Divergent trilogy had sold a combined 6.7 million copies, and a film adaptation of Divergent was released in 2014.
But the criticism of her books—that they had inconsistent worldbuilding, and were cheesy or too unrealistic—stuck with Roth, and although she wrote several standalones after that, it wasn't until the fall of 2019 that Roth began working on another dystopian novel. Roth's conception of this novel and the world it depicted didn't come to her fully formed but rather changed a lot over the six years and many drafts it took to complete; that process, which Roth wrote about in a Substack newsletter, is an interesting case study in how much can change between drafts and how a writer finds the "right" version of their story.
In the case of Seek the Traitor's Son, the novel started with "the idea of two people who are told they're destined to destroy each other, and what happens when love and loyalty complicate that prophecy," Roth said in an interview. Elegy, the novel's main female lead, was originally going to be a king seeking help from a dangerous man named Theren. This initial draft, only five pages long, mostly revolved around the dynamic between these two characters, but Roth found Theren's character more interesting, and so the second draft was his backstory, with very indistinct world building and no Elegy. It took four more drafts before Roth even began exploring Elegy; the subsequent two drafts revealed Elegy's character, especially through her interactions with Theren.
And yet having solved the issue of the characters, Roth said she realized that she "had no idea, really, where this story took place and how the setting impacted the characters and plot." Draft nine was thus set on a ruined and futuristic Earth, resulting from a previous suggestion from Roth's YA publisher that "they would prefer 'grounded' books (code in this case for 'set on Earth')." Roth ran with that and found that setting the book on Earth sparked lots of world-building ideas, including the idea of the Fever, a virus that kills everyone but resurrects half of the infected after a few days and grants them supernatural abilities, which allowed her to explain the magic that was in the earlier drafts. ("It is now my favorite aspect of the worldbuilding, and I can't believe I wrote EIGHT DRAFTS without it," she wrote.)
After 3,000 pages of writing, the tenth draft became the rough draft of what would become Seek the Traitor's Son; and writing all those drafts was a learning experience that taught the author more about what she wanted and what was right for the story. Roth contrasts Seek with her Divergent trilogy: with Divergent, she wrote in a different newsletter, "I was trying to make the book feel as big as the space it was taking up in my life. The scale had to be as grand as I could make it." Seek, on the other hand, is built on smaller moments; "Intimate moments between characters engage our emotions, and there are ways to make those intimate moments feel just as consequential as huge set pieces," she writes. The importance of that intimacy was revealed to Roth through extensive development and revision of the novel.
by Marcy Dermansky
Joannie hadn't been on a date in seven years when Johnny invites Joannie and her daughter to dinner. His house is beautiful, his son is sweet, and their first kiss is, well, it's not the best, but Joannie could convince herself it was nice enough. But when Joannie's childhood crush, a summer-camp fling turned famous billionaire, crash-lands his hot-air balloon in Johnny's swimming pool, Joannie dives in.
Soon she finds herself alighting on a lost weekend with Johnny the bad kisser, Jonathan the billionaire, and Julia, his smart, stunning wife. Does Joannie want Jonathan? Does Julia want her husband? Or Joannie? Or Joannie's beautiful little girl? Does Johnny want Julia? Does Jonathan want Joannie, or Julia, or maybe, his much younger personal assistant, Vivian, who is tasked to fix it all? A tale of lust and money and lust for money, Hot Air is as astonishing as it is blisteringly funny, a delirious, delicious story for our billionaire era.
Single mother Joannie is finally putting herself out there. She's on her first date since her divorce several years earlier, eating dinner with fellow single parent Johnny in his backyard, when a hot air balloon with a man and woman aboard crash lands into his pool. Joannie jumps into action, diving into the water to rescue the man, only to discover that he's a famous tech tycoon—who also happens to be the first boy she ever kissed. The two couples start talking, and what started as a chance encounter turns into a gathering that stretches on for days. Chapters rotate among different characters' points of view, so we get to see each of them through the others' eyes.
Class differences are a big theme in Marcy Dermansky's book. As the author of a celebrated novel, now making ends meet with freelance gigs and adjunct teaching roles, Joannie has intellectual stature but is by far the poorest of the group. Though she and her eight-year-old daughter, Lucy, live in a wealthy area, their home is a small apartment above a business. Lucy is surrounded by kids who have opportunities and possessions her family just can't afford. So Joannie is delighted when, later in the novel, she and Lucy are invited by the billionaire couple, Jonathan and Julia, to come to their sprawling mansion and swim in their pool. When the couple's assistant—apparently a fan of her work—recognizes her, Joannie feels ashamed, realizing she must look like a charity case or someone taking advantage of their largesse.
The assistant, Vivian, is also stuck between social spheres but in a different way. She's handsomely paid and indispensable to her employers, but she must be available to take on tasks around the clock. She dreams about going to graduate school for creative writing and is saving up to fully fund her degree, yet she knows her employers will be devastated when she quits. She's watching friends chart career paths that pay far less than hers but seem more fulfilling and impressive.
As much as both these women have friendly relationships with Jonathan and Julia, they never lose sight of the fact that the couple are their benefactors. Even though Joannie isn't their employee, they pamper her and her daughter with gifts and experiences, and she's keenly aware that their generosity could stop if she displeases them. Although she wants to believe that this is a normal friendship, it's not one between equals, and rifts begin to form.
Julia is one of the richest people in the world and yet she feels like something is missing. Although she longs for a child, we get the sense early on that she has a romanticized, unrealistic view of parenthood. She dotes on Lucy from the second she meets her but is unimpressed by Johnny's young son, whom she finds loud and unpleasant. The reader begins to wonder if this is actually a core desire for her or just the latest fixation of a bored rich woman looking for fulfilment. Meanwhile, her equally bored husband loves her but embarks on affairs with Hollywood actresses in order to feel alive. Though they lack for nothing, she seeks meaning and he craves adventure.
It's so fun to watch these characters interact. Though the book's plot, especially its wacky beginning, makes it feel like a romp, it also has deep emotional resonance. Readers may find themselves relating to Joannie and Vivian, who feel stuck in their current lives, or to Jonathan and Julia, who have achieved success and yet still aren't satisfied. While the book takes place over just a few days, we see the characters are profoundly changed by their unlikely friendship.
Hot Air will appeal to anyone who loves quirky, character-driven fiction. At just over 200 pages, it's a quick read, yet it packs a powerful punch.
Book reviewed by Jillian Bell
The novel Hot Air begins with a hot air balloon falling from the sky into a backyard pool. Hot air balloons have a long history dating back to the eighteenth century, significantly predating the airplane. The hot air balloon was invented by French paper manufacturers (and brothers) Joseph Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier, who were inspired by watching the way hot air lifted a paper or fabric bag. The first manned, untethered hot air balloon flight was in 1783.
Aboard were balloon pilot Jean Francois Pilatre de Rozier, who had earlier in the year carried out the first tethered manned flight, and nobleman Marquis Francois D'Arlandes. The passengers remained in the air for 25 minutes and travelled five miles. This first balloon was made of paper and silk, with a fire that was hand-fed by the occupants.
Just 10 days later, physicist Jacques Alexander Charles launched the first gas-powered balloon. Unlike the hot air balloon, this aircraft was powered not by heat but by hydrogen, a gas that's lighter than air. This gas-powered type became the predominant form of flying balloon during the early days of air travel. Much later, 1960 saw the invention of the modern hot air balloon, which is powered by a propane gas burner.
Both historical and modern versions of the hot air balloon are based on the scientific principle that hot air has less mass per volume than cooler air and thus is able to rise. Hot air balloons have a burner positioned under the balloon opening, allowing the air to be reheated and the balloon to continue rising. There is an upper limit to how high they can go, as the air very high in the sky is so thin that the force of the hot air can no longer lift the balloon.
Balloon pilots can lift the balloon by moving a control that opens the burner's propane valve. As the flame increases in size, the balloon will rise faster. They can also pull a cord to open the balloon's parachute valve, which allows some hot air to escape. This can help slow the balloon's rise, or even lower it. Balloon pilots can't actually maneuver the vehicle from side to side directly. They can only move up and down in order to catch and ride with the wind. This means that no pilot has full control over where the balloon will fly. Therefore, they usually have a ground crew for support and aim to land in a wide-open space.
If you've got the balloon bug, you might want to check out a hot air balloon event. One of the most scenic is the annual hot air balloon festival that takes place every August in Cappadocia, Turkey. Scores of balloons take flight over a stunning desert landscape, giving the setting a magical feel. You can book a tour on one of the balloons, but even the photos captured from the ground at this event are jaw-dropping.
If competitive sports are more your thing, you can follow along with the World Hot Air Balloon Championship. Pilots are given specific tasks, like dropping a marker from their balloon onto a precise target, to test their ballooning skills.
As with other vehicles, operating a hot air balloon requires a valid license. In the U.S., these are granted by the FAA. You can actually get the first level of licensure, a Student Balloon Pilot Certificate, at just 14 years old! Getting a student license is simple, but it only allows you to pilot a balloon under the direct supervision of a private instructor. The next level, a Private Balloon Pilot Certificate, allows you to fly recreationally without supervision—but you'll need ten hours of flight training and a passing score on a knowledge test to qualify. To fly balloons professionally, you'll need to log more flight hours and pass further tests to get a Commercial Balloon Pilot Certificate—so don't go quitting your day job just yet.
It's heartening to know that there are strict requirements for becoming a hot air balloon pilot in the U.S. It makes backyard crash landings like the one in Hot Air a whole lot less likely!
One of a set of collectible cards with pictures of events in ballooning history, depicting the first aerial voyage with Pilâtre de Rozier and d'Arlandes on November 21, 1783, courtesy of Library of Congress
by David George Haskell
We live on a floral planet, yet flowers don't get the credit they deserve. We admire them for their aesthetics, not their power. In this exquisite exploration of the role flowers played in creating the world we know today, David George Haskell observes, smells, and studies flowers such as magnolias, orchids, and roses, as well as fascinating but less celebrated flowers such as seagrasses and tea to show us what we've been missing.
Flowers are beautiful revolutionaries. When they evolved, they remade the natural world: Gorgeous petals and alluring aromas transformed former enemies into cooperative partners. Flowers reinvented plant sexuality and motherhood, bringing male and female together in the same flower and amply provisioning seeds and fruits, innovations that also feed legions of animals, ourselves included. Through radical genetic flexibility, flowers turned past environmental upheavals into opportunities for renewal. This inventiveness allowed them to build and sustain rainforests, savannahs, prairies, and even ocean shores.
Without flowers, human beings would not exist. We are a floral species. Flowers catalyzed our evolution, and we now depend on them for food and a healthy planet. When we perfume ourselves, give a loved one a bouquet, or use blooms in gardens and religious ceremonies, we honor the special bond between people and flowers. The study of flowers also shaped modern science and horticulture in ways both marvelous and, sometimes, unjust.
Looking to the future, flowers offer us lessons on resilience and creativity in the face of rapid environmental change. We need floral creativity, beauty, and joy more than ever. How Flowers Made Our World combines lyrical writing, sensual exploration, and the latest in scientific research to explore some of the most consequential life forms ever to have evolved, showing how our planet came to be and how it thrives today.
How could something as decorative and ephemeral as a flower play a role in human evolution? At first glance, the title of David George Haskell's latest book, How Flowers Made Our World, seems hyperbolic. But as he explains, in clear, scientific prose combined with descriptive personal observations, the rise of flowering plants was, in fact, a biological revolution, and our past, present, and future are bound up with these organisms much more than we realize.
A professor of environmental science and award-winning author, Haskell has written extensively about evolution, trees, and forests, and now he turns his attention to beloved yet underappreciated flowers. Not that they're "underappreciated" in terms of their beauty or scent, but in the understanding of how the forms of plant reproduction specific to flowers affected all of life on Earth.
Most of the book is structured in chapters named after a particular flower, which is then used to exemplify the topic of the chapter. He begins with magnolias—ancient flowers that were some of the first to drive the evolutionary explosion of bees, wasps, butterflies, and myriad other insects over 100 million years ago. Birds also underwent incredible diversification as nectar-filled flowers evolved. We learn in the Magnolia chapter that while flowers didn't "invent" insect pollination, they improved upon the haphazard pollination of existing plants like mosses and ferns (those that reproduce by spores, not separate male and female flower parts) by prehistoric insects. These interrelationships also led to the evolution of fruit, as flowering plants found more ways to encase their seeds in attractive and nutritious packages for animals to help spread them.
Haskell goes on to explain the genetic diversity that accompanied all of these botanical innovations, such as chromosome duplication and cutting. It's the trial-and-error approach so fundamental to natural selection. He explores it simply and clearly for the non-expert, but it's detailed enough that plant nerds (speaking as one) won't be bored.
The Orchid chapter provides a deeper dive into flowers' co-evolution with other non-human species, but for readers more interested in what this all means for people, the Grass, Rose, and Tea chapters provide the most eye-opening connections between the floral world and our own. The chapter on roses explores the many ways plants use scents for their own ends (see Beyond the Book), but Haskell also shows the cultural functions of flowers throughout human history; for example, wearing perfume dates back to ancient times, and using aromatic plants and incense in funerary rights and burials goes back even further.
Grasses, which aren't traditionally thought of as "flowers," do in fact have flowering components, without which agriculture would never have been invented—the seeds of plants that, botanically speaking, are grasses, such as wheat and rice, are the grains that we eat and make into bread. As Haskell describes, certain mutant grasses held onto their seeds longer than their siblings. "By selectively keeping and replanting the mutants, ancient humans gained the first cereal crops," he explains.
Haskell rightly doesn't shy away from the ugly sides of flowers. The pursuit of flowering plants like tea made and unmade empires and played a role in slavery and colonialism. Efforts to categorize plants during the Enlightenment led to both discovery and discrimination, as evolutionary principles were warped to justify racism and exploitation.
He also does an excellent job of provoking readers to think about the darker side of the modern horticulture industry—namely environmental damage from pesticides and "invasives," which are plants moved to an area where they didn't evolve, in which they crowd out indigenous plants and starve local pollinators. He deftly navigates the artifice and waste of an event like the Chelsea Flower Show, but also its potential to teach visitors and open their minds to different ways of seeing the natural world:
"Flower lovers don't need shielding or diverting. We are not so naïve to believe that a garden is an escape from every travail… Gardening puts us in intimate touch with the earthy, green troubles of the living world, from failed plantings, uncooperative weather, difficult soils, and the balance of control and acceptance that every 'pest' and 'weed' challenges us with."
Once again, casual plant fans will learn new things, while grizzled veterans will appreciate the nuanced perspective.
Haskell ends the book by imagining how flowers might adapt in a changed climate, and how our relationships with them can evolve for our survival as well, for example, by not eradicating weeds but rather appreciating their tenacity and ability to keep flowering. The afterword even offers fun, helpful tips for engaging with flowers in new ways: how to distill rosewater, how to hand pollinate an orchid, how to keep a flower diary, and more.
These sections tackle complex topics and hard science, but they do so with approachable language and humanizing personal anecdotes, which are invaluable in any good science writing. Whether you can currently identify a stamen and pistil or you're hearing those words for the first time since eighth grade biology, How Flowers Made Our World is an engaging and thought-provoking walk through botanical evolution. And Haskell never loses sight of the wider community—of fungi, pollinators, and the most impactful animal of all, humans—in the story of how life's ingenuity always works as a team.
Book reviewed by Rose Rankin
The smell of cut grass is a ubiquitous scent of summer, but did you know it's actually a cry for help? What we smell is a volatile organic compound (VOC) released by grass blades to signal that they're under attack. This is just one manifestation of how plants use chemical signals to communicate, and humans have only recently begun to understand how widespread and effective these signals are.
David George Haskell describes this phenomenon with flowers using scents to attract pollinators, the same aromas that attract human admirers. But these scents can also be used for protection or even deception, as he recounts in How Flowers Made Our World:
"Go away, say the chemicals, this plant is nasty. These volatiles not only taste bad or are poisonous but advertise the plants' unpalatability. A few plants extend the conversation to the enemies of their enemies. When attacked by insects, plants release volatiles into the air and soil that summon parasitic wasps, predatory mites, and insect-killing nematode worms."
These complex interspecies communications went largely ignored and even ridiculed for decades following the publication of the pseudo-scientific book The Secret Life of Plants in 1973. This spread the purported evidence of plants responding to different styles of music among other un-replicated experiments. Botanists vigorously rejected any ideas about "plant intelligence," as the ideas in The Secret Life of Plants threatened to undermine the legitimacy of the entire field.
But the tide has turned in recent years, and academic researchers have conducted rigorous, peer-reviewed studies that prove plants do, in fact, communicate with each other and with other species all the time. As Zoe Schlanger explained in The Light Eaters, birch trees absorb the scent of nearby rhododendrons to ward off parasites, and crops can even signal to predators to come eat the caterpillars eating them:
"The plant then releases a finely tuned chemical gas. Within an hour, the correct wasps arrive. The wasps…insert their needle-like appendages in the caterpillars' bodies, injecting their eggs inside them…And thus the plant attempts to save itself. De Moraes discovered this behavior in corn, tobacco and cotton in 1998."
The field of botany still lives in the long shadow of The Secret Lives of Plants, and researchers remain wary of using terms like "intelligence," not only because of the book but also in an effort to not anthropomorphize plants. It's important to recognize that plants experience the world differently than we do and to not assume their reactions are the same as ours.
But even if they're not as obvious to humans as the warning cries of a freshly mowed lawn, plants use VOCs and chemical signaling to communicate in ways far more sophisticated than many give them credit for.
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