The Secret Book of Flora Lea

“Edwin gave her a new life. He taught her what he’d taught all of them: Cultivate a love of fine and rare books in a customer and you didn’t just have a sale that day but also a devoted customer for decades.”

This moment gives nuance to Hazel’s workplace as well as communicating The Restorative Power of Storytelling and the power stories have to bring communities together. Although the books Hazel works with are intrinsically valuable, this attitude puts the emotional and sentimental value of books at the forefront—which, not coincidentally, ultimately pays off for the business more than any single collectors’ piece.

“They’d been fitted at school—Hazel’s dark black and Flora with the pre-school version, which was a red-and-blue Mickey Mouse mask designed to keep young children from being frightened of them, but it didn’t work.”

In the deeply saturated genre of WWII fiction, the novel needs to rely on precise, human details to create a connection with the reader. This simple and innocent moment of being fitted for gas masks alludes to the true horrors of war experienced by very young people living through this tempestuous time. Using a Disney motif that most readers will recognize brings the children’s experience to life in a visceral way.

“Naming was not to be taken lightly. Flora and Hazel and their mum, Camellia—they’d all been named after plants. Lea and Mersey, their middle names, born of their parents’ childhood rivers.”

Names are explored in detail throughout the novel, with many names being taken from the natural world and several being given double meanings. This moment draws attention to how names connect this family, as well as encouraging the reader to consider the names as individuals. While “Flora” refers to the broader spectrum of growth, “Hazel” refers to a specific tree that has a long folkloric history of being associated with knowledge and wisdom. The choice of names the girls were given suggests that the world they created was intrinsic within them all along.

“The kettle sang and she poured the boiling water over the Darjeeling tea bag in her favorite porcelain cup with the tiny pink flowers around the edge. She dropped in two sugars, recalling when rationing left them without such luxury.”

This moment incorporates a subtle motif of the natural world, one that is echoed all throughout the novel in a range of ways. It shows how Hazel unconsciously seeks connection with this world, and through it her sister, in the world around her. Her awareness of rationing even two decades after its reality also displays how the war left a traumatic mark on those who lived through it, even as the world appears, on its surface, to have moved on.

“At twenty-five years old, she’d realized that all she could do with the ache and the shame was to live with it, allow it to walk next to her like a shadow, a ghost, a living memory.”

This is one of the exceptional moments in the novel that focuses on Hazel in between the two primary timelines. It displays her transition from her childhood in the 1930s to her womanhood of the 1960s—a moment of acceptance of the mistakes she made and a realization that they could not be undone, only carried. The idea of a “living memory” becomes a type of story in itself, but here the story is a negative influence rather than a positive one.

“The beauty of the city rose tall and mighty with pinnacles and towers, with arched and vectored windows carved into stone. A hopeful lightness grew in Hazel’s chest. They weren’t headed to the terrible part of a fairy tale with hags, witches, and dragons.”

At this point, Hazel is still young enough to see magic and wonder in everything; She has not yet had her wonder taken away by the effects of the war. This moment shows how even the most frightening situations are viewed through a magical lens, which gives her the strength to overcome them. The imagery used also supports the novel’s wider aesthetic of hope, joy, and fairy-tale living and gives the reader a sense of what to expect on an emotional level.

“She would need to be Mum for Flora, and sister and storyteller.”

Like many others who lived during wartime, Hazel is forced to step into an adult role too quickly. Flora gives her something to fight for and inspires her to maturity for the sake of protecting her loved one. Notably, Hazel also includes “storyteller” in this role, illustrating the weight given to this practice and alluding to the traditionally sacred role of the storyteller in rural communities.

“Peggy sat, pulled out her lined notebook, and began to write, to fall into the world of Whisperwood, a land that belonged to her and to her mother. This is where she belonged and she would not allow some bizarre phone call to set her off this task.”

The use of the word “belonged” is a point of contention in the novel, as Hazel argues at different points that her story belongs to her and Flora, as well as arguing that stories don’t truly belong to anyone. Reversed, however, this moment suggests that it is Peggy who belongs to Whisperwood—that this story offers her a place to come home to and embrace her entire self. Her relationship with her writing highlights the restorative power of storytelling.

“Hazel opened the trunk. On top lay Flora’s tattered bear. Below, neatly folded in separate piles, were Harry’s sketches, newspaper articles, and photos. And at the very bottom, buried beneath all of it, rested a pile of letters from Harry that had been gathered together in twine.”

In this moment, Hazel’s trunk that she keeps hidden away functions as a metaphor for her internal journey. The teddy bear is a metonym for Flora herself, representing Hazel’s lost sister; this item is at the very top, or the surface, suggesting its omnipresence on the surface of Hazel’s mind. Beneath this are memories of Hazel’s life in Oxfordshire, and buried at the bottom is her love for Harry himself. The sequence in which they’re presented mirrors Hazel’s consciousness and her driving forces throughout the novel.

“But Hazel also knew that stories didn’t belong to anyone. They were everywhere.”

This moment directly contradicts attitudes taken by Hazel, Peggy, Peggy’s mother, and others throughout the novel; however, her perspective here is more clear-headed and open-hearted than she becomes later in the story. She acknowledges that the power stories have is not in the individual, but in their power to bring people together. Much of Hazel’s journey through her experience involves losing and then reclaiming this belief.

“Despair leads us to stories, of course. We invent them so we can live in a world with meaning. I told you stories. We danced to stories. I spun them over fires and over this very kitchen table.”

This moment presents storytelling as a light in times of darkness. Like Hazel, Bridie uses stories as a way of making sense of the world, particularly in times when sense seems to be failing. Bridie’s perspective on life illustrates the restorative power of storytelling and the place it has in her everyday home living.

“Peggy’s education had been focused on mythology and fairy tales, which most people didn’t know are not the same thing, and yet they are connected, part of a larger universe.”

In contrast to Bridie’s rural storytelling tradition, Peggy takes a more academic look at the role stories have in shaping the world. While elements of Peggy’s character are foils to Hazel and Bridie, their shared love of storytelling links them all together across the Atlantic. Here, she references myths and fairy tales, two distinct (as she points out) yet fundamentally foundational elements of world history. Through myth and fairy tales, people of all cultures have found ways to understand the magic of the everyday.

“But this river, the same one in name, the same one that flowed to London, glittered and winked as ducks waddled towards its silty edge and swans floated serenely by the tree branches that bowed over the waters, worshipping it.”

The subtle reference to worship in this moment highlights the novel’s underlying theme of religion and spirituality. This moment shows that spirituality exists even in the natural world. The action is also an example of personification, in which a non-human entity is given a human characteristic. Personification, here and elsewhere, is a manifestation of the natural human need to create narrative in the world around them. This is another example of how Hazel sees the world through the lens of story. This moment also juxtaposes London to their current surroundings, further highlighting the divide between city and country so integral to the novel.

“‘If the king loved her and wanted to marry her, why did he just let her run away or did he go looking for her?’ Hazel asked. This seemed important to her. Wasn’t it worthwhile going after someone you loved?”

Although Hazel is still very young, this moment illustrates her guiding characteristic that will drive the events of the plot. While hearing this story, Hazel finds something fundamentally wrong in the possibility of letting someone one loves go without fighting for them. As an adult, she embraces this mindset to an erosive degree as she chases after clues about Flora’s whereabouts. This mindset also causes her to believe Harry didn’t care enough for her, leading to their decades-long estrangement.

“Hazel held her sister and rubbed her back; she made the clucking noises their own mum made when something had gone awry. Hazel imitated and practiced being an adult without feeling like one at all.”

This moment highlights Hazel’s inexperience with adulthood, despite her good intentions. Without any lived experience of comforting a child, she resorts to imitating what she has seen around her, the way many children do when they are exploring their own natures. Here the novel again displays how many children and young adults like Hazel were pushed into roles for which they weren’t adequately prepared, as well as displaying Hazel’s loyalty to her sister.

“Mum wasn’t the same and Hazel didn’t know how to define it, but the before-war Mum was gone. The pearls and high heels; the singsong voice of happy adventure; the cakes she made that tipped over with thick icing; the picnics in the backyard pretending they were on holiday. That mum seemed asleep, as if an evil witch had put a spell on her.”

At this point in the novel, Hazel’s innocence is beginning to erode. She sees this reflected in the world around her and particularly in her mother, who is being eroded in a different way. Like previous scenes, Hazel views this change through the lens of storytelling to make it less frightening. However, this marks the beginning of the decline of Hazel’s faith in the power of stories.

“‘A pagan,’ Bridie said, ‘is nothing more than someone who still believed in the very animation of nature and uses the old stories to build new ones.’”

Religion and spirituality are a strong part of Bridie’s personal life and her community. However, her nontraditional lifestyle puts her at odds with the other women, leading to this contentious exchange. She sees little distinction between the old world and the new, believing them to be two sides of the same core system of belief. In this moment, she evades the social impact of the term “pagan” and instead uses it as a teaching point to convey this belief system onto Hazel.

“He stared while weighing her words, her past, and their future. Then he pulled her toward him and kissed her. Hazel felt as if she were watching herself being kissed, as if she stood outside the window peeking in on two lovers she didn’t know.”

In the present day, Hazel still has an instinct to observe her experiences through storytelling. In this moment, Hazel uses this instinct to disassociate from her relationship with Barnaby. She treats herself and her partner like characters in a story external to herself so that she can temporarily distance herself from the need to take responsibility for her choices.

“The various names of the places across the warfront meant little to Hazel. She heard them rattled off from her own mum and in the newspapers; foreign names where men were fighting with guns and knives and bombs, places where people died while she sat in a cozy cottage in the countryside of Oxfordshire and made stories of a magical land.”

Much of the novel’s thematic impact comes from the sharp and tragic juxtaposition of city and country, reality and story. This distance from the realities of war allows Hazel to have a childhood that was denied to many people her age at this time. This moment highlights the contrast between the life she is creating for her and her sister and the life being faced by others who are directly affected by the conflict.

“In her stories, she and Harry lived in the house, just the two of them. They wandered not only through the woodlands but through life. He kissed her good morning and kissed her goodnight. They shared a bedroom—what went on in that bedroom was unclear, but the door closed with them inside.”

This moment represents the larger coming-of-age process that Hazel is undergoing through her time with the Aberdeens. She is still young and naive enough that the mechanics of sexuality are a mystery; however, she is arriving at a stage where she recognizes it as something she needs. Here, she is using her ever-present coping mechanism of storytelling to process the feelings and desires that are new and unfamiliar.

“If she kept running backward, she would never quite be able to run forward. Even if a miracle had occurred and Flora had survived to tell the story and carry it across the sea, even then, six-year-old Flora was still gone. Even if Hazel found her sister, she would not find the sister she had lost.”

This revelation illustrates The Double-Edged Power of Hope. Hazel is fixated on the possibility of reclaiming her lost sister, but she also comes to recognize the detrimental effect it’s having on her relationship and future. Here, she stumbles upon a piece of fundamental wisdom: she has been changed by time, and it is naive to believe Flora has not undergone her own dramatic change. In this revelation Hazel begins to grow and take a more honest look at her goals and needs.

“Each carried her own grief, sometimes in opposing ways, and in other moments they found themselves on the same grief-stricken sea holding on to each other for breath and life.”

Hazel and her mother have shared a cataclysmic, formative experience that binds them together in a new and powerful way. However, each had a unique relationship with Flora and a unique set of responsibilities to her, and in this their guilt and grief becomes a solitary act. This moment highlights how each tried to hold and support each other through a time of unprecedented hardship, yet also how grief is intrinsically isolating.

“Dot Bellamy listened and watched as these people she was supposed to know spoke to one another with such joy about her return.”

At this point, Dot has already been introduced, and both the characters and the narrator have referred to her by this first name. Here, the narration briefly reverts to her full name in order to emphasize her sense of personal identity. Because this section is one of the very few from Flora/Dot’s perspective, the use of her full name illustrates her strong sense of self. Without overtly stating it, the narrator reveals that Flora is clinging to this name and the life that goes with it and has not yet come to terms with her new discovery.