Publishers Weekly
05/25/2020
Perrin’s English-language debut is a tender and poignant exploration of love, loss, and redemption. Violette Toussaint, a middle-aged cemetery keeper, narrates the events that lead up to her husband leaving her. An orphan who survived a chaotic childhood, Violette taught herself to read and married the well-off, older Phillipe Toussaint in 1986, when Violette was 18. After a year, Violette grows distant after she senses Phillipe’s infidelity. When their jobs on the railway become automated, they move to Brancion-en-Chalon to become cemetery keepers. After a month, Phillipe leaves and doesn’t return, leaving Violette to develop a pleasant routine entertaining visitors with food and wine in the cemetery’s bucolic lodge. When Julien Seul, a detective, shows up to bury his mother, Violette is unnerved by how much he knows about her life. Perrin plaits the novel with the complex backstories of Violette, Phillipe, Julien, and Julien’s mother and her lover. While the storylines sometimes feel as if they’re competing with one another and tamp down the tension, Perrin keeps the reader engaged with a gradual payout of secrets that each character tries to protect. Perrin is adept at creating a flawed, amiable cast, and Violette is a delightfully engaging narrator. This enchanting indulgence in nature, drink, food, and friends is worth a look. (July)
From the Publisher
“Full of contentment and hope...Fans of Elizabeth Berg will enjoy this thoughtful take on the inner life of an unforgettable woman.”—Booklist
“A glorious read. Touching, thought provoking, taut: a tribute to our power to heal. Another must read.”—OCinsite.com
★ “Exuberant.”—ForeWord Reviews (Starred Review)
“Colorful and highly enjoyable.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Enchanting.”—Publishers Weekly
“Romantic, yes; light, yes; meaningless, no.”—Bethanne Patrick, Literary Hub
“Fresh Water for Flowers entranced me with its quiet joy.”—Kathi Kirby, Powell’s Books, Portland, OR
“Fresh Water For Flowers goes to show how debuts can be great works. Perrin plumbs the depths of motherhood, life on the streets, and regret in her story […] It is an extremely well-written book that was frankly difficult to put down…”—San Francisco Book Review
“Fresh Water for Flowers is a moving and lyrical portrait of one woman’s quest for happiness and love. A splendid work that will keep readers absorbed to the last page. A charming must-read.”—Lindsey Bartlett, formerly of Ellen Plumb’s City Bookstore, Emporia, KS
“Fresh Water for Flowers is a saga of a woman’s life from nothing to something…A story representative of many girls and women trapped by social and financial circumstances.”—The Winnipeg Free Press
“Readers will be swept away by the poetic gentleness of the narration, by the generous gaze that the two protagonists cast over human affairs, by the desire for peace felt by both Julian and Violette.”—La Croix (France)
“This book left me breathless and in tears!...A story of life with love, loss, yearning, sadness and all of the emotions that humans experience during their lifetimes.”—Stephanie Crowe, Page & Palette, Fairhope, AL
“Gorgeous.”—Cat Chapman, Oxford Exchange, Tampa, FL
“One of those special books that defy description and make you glad it was written!”—Deon Stonehouse, Sunriver Books & Music, Sunriver, OR
“The only way I can describe this book is that it’s an epic…It is contemporary fiction, a murder mystery, a thriller, a tragedy, and a romance all rolled into one.”—Katie MacKendrick, librarian, Denver Public Library
“Reading [Fresh Water for Flowers] was truly a magical experience.”—Quentin Greif, Little City Books, Hoboken, NJ
“This story is simply beautiful. Fresh, fun, and so unique.”—Kappy Kling, HearthFire Books, Evergreen, CO
“Breathtaking.”—Unidivers (France)
“This may be my favorite book of 2020…A novel of astonishing humanity accomplished with an art so subtle it will take your breath away.”—Mary McDonald, Nicola’s Books, Ann Arbor, MI
Kirkus Reviews
2020-03-15
French bestseller Perrin makes her English-language debut in an atmospheric novel rife with adulterous romances, bad marriages, mysterious deaths, and lots of burials.
The frequent burials are because narrator Violette Toussaint is a cemetery keeper at the Brancion-en-Chalon cemetery in Burgundy. She arrived there some 20 years ago with no-good husband Philippe, a philanderer and spoiled mama’s boy who did her a favor by disappearing shortly after they took up the post. Except Philippe turns out to be living 100 kilometers away with another woman, she learns from Julien Seul, a handsome detective who came to the cemetery because his recently deceased mother, Irène, had inexplicably decreed that her ashes be placed on the grave of a man buried there who was, needless to say, not her husband. At first, Perrin unspools her plot in a leisurely manner, intertwining Violette’s recollections of her trying marriage, the records she keeps of what was done and said at individual gravesides (touching testimonies to the infinite varieties of loss and grief), and amusing portraits of the eccentric cemetery staff. Once Julien enters to disrupt Violette’s neatly ordered world, the author augments an already busy narrative with plot strands concerning Irène’s decadeslong affair, the growing attraction between her son and the cemetery keeper, the tragic story of the Toussaints’ daughter, and a chorus of new voices that soften our view of the not-quite-as-rotten-as-he-seemed Philippe. It’s a lot for one book, and the novel does sometimes falter under its own weight, but Perrin’s eye is so compassionate, her characters so many-faceted, and the various mysteries she poses so intriguing that most readers will happily go along for the long ride toward a pleasingly romantic conclusion tempered by one last funeral.
Overstuffed, at times rambling, but colorful and highly enjoyable and pulled together by an engaging narrator.
