Love and Other Carnivorous Plants by Florence Gonsalves

Release Date: May 15th, 2018
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Genre: Young Adult | Fiction
Pages: 352 Pages
Format: ARC
Source: From Publisher
Reason: For an honest review

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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.

It's hard to take a book like this and say how much you enjoyed it considering the subject matter, but it's true, I really liked this book!

I really enjoyed Danny's character. Her dark and sarcastic humour added comedic relief to the overall tone of the novel. The book itself dives into the struggles of eating disorders, addiction, and depression with the real-life realities of living life through it all. Florence Gonsalves did a wonderful job at penning these delicate subjects and delivering them with a raw voice. It can be tough approaching Mental health in novels. It's placing a very real struggle into a fictional world and the author did a spectacular job. I feel that if anyone who has been in Danny's shoes would have felt the author was very authentic. There was no sugar-coating. It was no holds barred.  It was raw and untethered. 

There are multiple storylines going on in the novel. We have Danny and Sara, Danny and Bugg, Danny and her parents and Danny and herself.  Each storyline packs a lot of punch. Each one is riddled with highs and lows. It's messy but in an intentional way.

Love and Other Carnivorous Plants went beyond my expectations. I wasn't expecting this book to turn out the way that it did. It's sad yet hilarious at times. Even though it's a fictional story, it's a very truthful representation of disorders and mental health.  Definitely a one-of-a-kind read!

"When I no longer hear her receding footsteps, I touch the place where her lips were, half expecting to find a scar."