The Florist's Daughter by Patricia Hampl
Review by Jennifer Reese
In
her lovely, elliptical memoir of family and loss, Hampl brings her late
mother and father back to life then gently lays them to rest again. "Nothing
is harder to grasp than the relentlessly modest life," she writes. Then she
does just that, conjuring not just her parents' modesty but everything that
was extraordinary and mysterious about them, from her astringent mother's
sense of adventure to the late-in-life revelations of her mild-mannered
father, a St. Paul florist who brought "an aura of quiet, to the flowers he
arranged." This beautiful bouquet of a book commemorates both. A-