Tilly Harper leaves her home in Northern England to become an assistant housemother at a home for blind and crippled girls in London. The "girls" are not just any girls, though: they are Mr. Shaw's flower girls. Some of them are twice as old as 20-year-old Tilly, some a few years younger. All of them work at the adjacent factory crafting silk flowers, which are famous enough for even Queen Alexandra to notice.
Settling into her room, Tilly discovers a small box of trinkets that belonged to the previous occupant, the now-deceased Flora Flynn. Inside the box is also a journal, in which Flora describes her heartbreak at losing her her younger sister when they were penniless flower girls on the streets of London. Still reeling from her own losses, Tilly determines to find out what happened to the younger sister (and this 100 years before The Google).
Hazel Gaynor's A Memory of Violets has potential. Gaynor writes well and her characters have plenty of depth and personality. She simply tries to do too much. There are too many narratives happening here: Flora's story, Tilly's current story, Tilly's past history, and then later, Rosie's stories. Either Flora or Tilly could have stood on her own, and combining them felt forced and unnecessary. (I had a similar to reaction to The Girl Who Came Home, so I will say that Gaynor is nothing if not consistent.)
My biggest complaint, though, is that Gaynor relies on way too many coincidences for the story to be believable. All of the book's characters simply could not have been connected. I understand that without the connections, the lives of Flora and Tilly simply run parallel to one another, and never the twain shall meet. No, it's simply too tall of an order to believe it all could have happened as Gaynor wrote here.
The final verdict: this isn't a bad book. It's just not a great one, and there are too many of those for me to recommend this one wholeheartedly.
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