The Florist

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The Florist's Daughter

This New York Times Notable memoir of a middle-class, middle-America family is a “beautiful bouquet of a book” (Entertainment Weekly). They say “a daughter is a daughter all her life,” and no statement could be truer for Patricia Hampl. Born to a Czech father—an artistic florist—and a wary Irish mother, Hampl experienced a childhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, that couldn’t have been more normal, the perfect example of a twentieth century middle-class, middle-American upbringing. But as she faces the death of her mother, Hampl reflects on the struggles her parents went through to provide that normal, boring existence, and her own struggles with fulfilling the role of dutiful daughter as she grew through the postwar years to the turbulent sixties and couldn’t help wanting to rebel against the notion of a “relentlessly modest life.” Named a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, The Florist’s Daughter is Hampl’s most extraordinary work to date—a “quietly stunning” reminiscence of a Midwestern girlhood, and a reflection on what it means to be a daughter (People).

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