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Book Reviewed by:This is a story about desire, dreams, decay―and working retail at the end of the world.
After losing her job and her fiancé and moving back from the city to live with her parents, Shell Pine needs some help. And according to the sign in the window, the florist shop in the mall does too. Shell gets the gig, and the flowers she works with there are just the thing she needs to cheer up. Or maybe it's Neve, the beautiful shop manager, who is making her days so rosy?
But you have to get your hands dirty if you want your garden to grow―and Neve's secrets are as dark and dangerous as they come. In the back room of the flower shop, a young sentient orchid actually runs the show, and he is hungry ... and he has a plan for them all.
When the choices are to either bury yourself in the warmth of someone else's fertile soil, or face the cold and disappointing world outside―which would you choose? And what if putting down roots came at a cost far higher than just your freedom?
Excerpt
Eat the Ones You Love
Only in a time-locked building like the Woodbine Crown Mall would you see a HELP NEEDED sign in a shop window.
Not HELP WANTED.
Needed.
It was handwritten on the back of a piece of what looked to be torn wrapping paper and taped to the glass, at an odd angle. Shell stood outside the florist, her groceries and gravity tugging red crevices in the palms of her hands. Well. Her mother's groceries. Not what she'd choose for dinner, but it wasn't Shell's kitchen, or Shell's table.
HELP NEEDED.
Shell's own voice inside her head had been so loud lately. We all need help. She imagined that whoever it was running a dank little flower shop in the Woodbine Crown probably needed a fair amount of help. Maybe not more than her, necessarily. But more than most.
The mall was almost exactly as it had been since Shell was a child, or before, even. Three wings, and the great glass terrarium in the atrium, murked with moss and condensation. This would have been a gorgeous feature if ...
At the center of Woodbine, hidden in plain sight in an emerald-green terrarium, thrives Baby, a carnivorous, man-eating orchid, lovingly tended by Neve... And yet because the book's main perspective is Baby's, the reader feels a twisted and disturbing sympathy for and intimacy with his feelings for Neve... Their relationship is more complicated, more interesting, and more incestuous than a straightforwardly "toxic" relationship...continued
Full Review
(1041 words)
(Reviewed by Isabella Zhou).
Sarah Rees Brennan, New York Times bestselling author of Long Live Evil
Sarah Maria Griffin is an artist of the rarest kind: genuine, vulnerable, funny, tragic and wise. V. E. Schwab, New York Times bestselling author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
Deliciously strange, delightfully wicked. Zoraida Córdova, USA Today bestselling author of The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina
A beautiful dark gem of a book.The main horror of Eat the Ones You Love comes from a ravenous orchid that can only be truly satisfied by human meat. It's a myth that some orchid species consume meat, but other carnivorous plants do exist. There are more than 600 known species that survive on insects and other animals; carnivory is such an efficient adaptation that it has evolved independently multiple times and occurs in unrelated plant families. Smaller carnivorous plants eat single-celled organisms, like bacteria, and aquatic plants also eat crustaceans, mosquito larvae, and small fish. Larger plants can eat reptiles and small mammals.
Carnivorous plants use a variety of strategies to capture their prey. One of these strategies is pitfall traps: the plant has a ...
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