I initially read about Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire in Elle Magazine. They ran a glowing review that truly captivated me and had me running to read this book! It sounded unlike anything I had ever read.
Lila Nova is a recently divorced 32- year-old ad woman who’s too traumatized even to dip her toe into the dating scene. She has retreated to a characterless studio apartment on Manhattan’s Union Square with “no memories trapped in the walls or the floorboards. No arguments or harrowing scenes of unrequited love staring at me from the bathroom mirror.” Then she catches her boss in a revolting act of Peeping Tomism at a supermodel ad shoot. But this sad-sack everywoman could just as easily have been christened India Jones by first-time novelist Margot Berwin in her shameless guilty pleasure of a romp, Hothouse Flower and the 9 Plants of Desire ( Pantheon), because soon one David Exley, a gorgeously rough-hewn plant-seller dude at the local greenmarket, takes Lila down a rabbit hole into an adventure combining the kinetic, cinematic razzle- dazzle of a Spielberg fantasia with the Mesoamerican metaphysical mojo of Carlos Castaneda, who provides the novel’s epigraph and a good deal of its botanically hallucinatory, shape-shifting animal spirits.
True, the whole enterprise has a faintly schematic, paraliterary air about it, until the mysterious Armand, who runs a plantfestooned Laundromat on First Avenue, lures Lila into an increasingly desperate rare-plant expedition and vision quest in Mexico’s Yucatán that involves black panthers, poisonous snakes, scorpions, and— putting Lila in a very sticky situation—both Mr. Exley and the Adonis-like son of a Huichol Indian shaman. The question of who’s using who here opens onto a bewildering hall of mirrors as Lila finds she must draw on her untapped spiritual strengths to extricate herself from a fatally compromised, and compromising, position.
Berwin is a former ad copywriter who spent a spell in a rural village in the Yucatán and in fact has a friend who owns a Laundromat stuffed with plants, as well as a pal named Armand (the book is dedicated to him). She contends that all resemblances to persons living or dead pretty much stop there. And I have no idea what she was smoking when she cooked up this sultry, psychedelic summer soufflé of a read, to which Julia Roberts has already snapped up the film rights, but…I’ll have some of that!
As I was reading the book, I discovered that Christina Schwartz, author of Drowning Ruth, All is Vanity, and So Long at the Fair, had written a superb review of the book on Amazon. com. She had me at “lush and steamy summer read.”
Debut novelist Margot Berwin gives her fecund imagination free play in this lush and steamy summer read. Recently divorced and craving a blank slate, 30-something advertising copywriter Lila Nova moves into a new studio apartment “with absolutely no character” on Union Square. Lila, the sort of contemporary heroine given to amusing self-deflating wisecracks, is not, however, destined to inhabit a clean, white box for long. Within a few chapters, packed with romantic betrayal, plant lore and a couple of visits to a surreal Laundromat in the East Village, she’s on her way to “high adventure” in the Yucatan rain forest, where she’ll encounter ancient magic, poisonous creatures, a murderous exotic plant dealer, and, yes, true love. A wildly inventive novel as vivid and colorful as a jungle flower.
So with all this buildup I was worried that the book would not live up to the expectations. It more than exceeded my expectations! I was so absorbed in the world created by Berwin that I had to consciously pull myself out in order to get anything done. Berwin has written a stunning debut that is filled with adventure, love, betrayal, and an entire world of plants.
The story is told in first person and it resonates beautifully with the personal discovery theme of the novel. I found myself pulling quotes from the novel and frantically scribbling them down trying not to disrupt my rapture with the novel. Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire has already been acquired by Julia Roberts to produce and star in the film version.
This is such a great summer read and I’m sure Margot Berwin will have a long and successful career! I am eagerly anticipating her next release.
