Nine-year-old Alice Hart lives near the seaside, but she’s forced to move away after a family tragedy. She’s now going to live with her estranged grandmother June, a woman she has never met before. June runs a farm called Thornfield inland, with a group of women she calls the Flowers. June teaches Alice the language of the Australian native flowers.
On her first day of school, Alice makes friends with a boy called Oggi and that friendship turns into love when the two are older. Alice and Oggi make plans to go travel to Europe, to Bulgaria, the country where Oggi was born. But on the date and time they were supposed to meet, Oggi doesn’t turn up. Alice later discovers that Oggi and his mother were deported. What she doesn’t learn until much later is that June reported them to the immigration authorities.
Alice becomes more and more frustrated by her grandmother’s silence and secrecy, so packs up her belongings into her truck and moves to the desert n her early twenties. Here she meets a wonderful veterinarian called Moss who helps her with the dog (Pip) she picked up on a parking lot on the way there. Once the dog is better, Alice starts work at Kililpitjara National Park, which centers around a celestial meteor crater known as Agnes Bluff. (This National Park is fictional, and Agnes Bluff is based on Gosses Bluff (Tnorala), an ancient, massive meteorite crater located west of Alice Springs. Here she befriends a couple of her fellow park rangers, and falls in love with one of them. However, Dylan starts alienating her from her other ranger friends and then becomes abusive. When Alice finally confides in one of her other friends, he has twisted the narrative and Alice is fired from her job. She and her friends tell the boss that it is Dylan who was abusive (he had previously been involved with one of the other female rangers who corroborates Alice’s story), he is fired as well.
Two of June’s flowers, Candy and Twig meet up with Alice at the National Park (she had asked Moss for help when Pip was injured and he sent her some medicine for the dog, he gave her address to the women), to tell her that June has died. During this visit, they give Alice a crucial family heirloom called the Thornfield Dictionary, which June left for her in her will. Inside this book, June had written down the hidden stories and secrets of the Hart family. It is through this dictionary that Alice finally learns the truth about her past, including the fact that her brother (Charlie) survived the fire and that June kept his existence a secret from her.
Alice now travels on with her dog and goes to the town where she grew up as a child. She walks into the library, and meets up with the woman who read to her in the hospital, Sally Morgan. When Alice was small, she had wandered into the library looking for books to read, Sally found her and saw how neglected the poor girl was.
Now Sally invites Alice to her home, and says she wants to talk to her about her past. When they get to Sally’s home, Alice discovers that Sally has a sculpture made by her father Clem. Sally tells her about her daughter, Jillian, who died of leukaemia, and who was Alice’s half-sister. She also learns that Sally and her husband took in Alice’s brother Charlie after the fire. Sally offers Alice her guest bedroom while she’s in town and Alice decides to stay with her. She later meets her brother and his girlfriend/fiancee (I can’t remember whether she is his girlfriend or fiancee, it’s been a few weeks since I read the book).
There’s so much going on in this book, and it was such an engrossing read. I screamed at Alice for letting Moss go, and getting in a relationship with Dylan – especially once he started showing the signs of abuse.
The information on the native Australian flowers was great as well. I really enjoyed that!
Read for the Read Between the Lines Reading Challenge 2026
Prompt 34: Flowers on the Cover or in the Title
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
