Love & Other Carnivorous Plants

by Florence Gonsalves

A darkly funny debut for fans of Becky Albertalli, Matthew Quick, and Ned Vizzini about a nineteen-year-old girl who's consumed by love, grief, and the many-tentacled beast of self-destructive behavior.

Freshman year at Harvard was the most anticlimactic year of Danny's life. She's failing pre-med and drifting apart from her best friend. One by one, Danny is losing all the underpinnings of her identity. When she finds herself attracted to an older, edgy girl who she met in rehab for an eating disorder, she finally feels like she might be finding a new sense of self. But when tragedy strikes, her self-destructive tendencies come back to haunt her as she struggles to discover who that self really is. With a starkly memorable voice that's at turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Love and Other Carnivorous Plants brilliantly captures the painful turning point between an adolescence that's slipping away and the overwhelming uncertainty of the future.

• ISBN10: 0316436720
• ISBN13: 9780316436724
• Publish Date: 14 June 2018
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
• Imprint: Little, Brown Young Readers
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 352
• Language: English

Reviews

[Amber (The Literary Phoenix)]

I very much wanted to love this book, and it didn't happen for me. There was a lot going on that I wanted to get behind, a lot of topics I love to see rep for (people come in all shapes and sizes!) but I felt that there were some flaws in the writing and characterization.

Depending on the type of reader you are, that may be a complete non-issue. I just didn't believe Danny. I felt like she was a flat characters. We heard all about the different horrible, crazy things going on in her life, but through the entire novel, I never felt like I felt any of it. Even though this was first person, I felt like I was watching things fall to pieces through a thick, dirty window, were you could only see some things and the dialogue was muted. And that's a real bummer to me because with a little emotional involvement, I think this could have been a much more successful book.

I do support the conversations had throughout the book about the seriousness of alcoholism and eating disorders. I think people will experience things in different ways, grieve and cope in different ways, and as such... this book may feel more relatable to others than it does to me. I hope that others find what they are looking for when they read this story - I just wish I loved it more.