A review by crafalsk264
Flowers of Darkness by Tatiana de Rosnay

challenging dark emotional informative mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Clarissa Katsef is an author began publication of her work in her 50s. As such, she is one of the oldest residents selected for an apartment in a new building specifically designed for artists. The building was brand new with state of the art features including an AI virtual assistant that controls  everything in the apartment from the lighting and climate control to the shopping and reception of Clarissa’s phone and email notices. Clarissa is escaping from her adulterous husband and desperate to find a new apartment. She has a daughter in her forties, a granddaughter in her teens. Her 98 year old father, a first husband and her current husband complete her family. 

From her first day in the apartment, Clarissa has an undeniable feeling of being watched. Her AI (Mrs. Dalloway) seems to be taking over more and more of her life. As Clarissa descends into depression, confusion, and extreme distrust of others grows, the reader becomes aware that she is living in a dystopian and Paris is no longer the world she has lived in.

De Rosnay incorporates aging, trust, identity, and a place in the world. The drama plays out in a refurbished Paris where there are no real flowers, birds and natural scents and sounds. The book considers how a society deals with life altering cataclysmic events and their aftermath. Clarissa’s journey of discovery is a turbulent upheaval of the life she thinks she knows and her place within it. The POV changes from a third party narrator to a first person perspective in pages from a notebook that Clarissa keeps regarding her feelings and efforts to understand what has happened to her. The book examines a sense of place and the weight of secrets. It also looks at some of the potential impacts of artificial intelligence on our daily lives.

I enjoyed this book but found some of it disturbing. The author did a good job of setting up the atmosphere of a dystopian world built on familiar elements. The suspense definitely grew and deepened throughout the first 75% of the novel before taking a surprise twist that ended the story in a totally unexpected way. I think a lot about what kind of world we would have after a cataclysmic event(s). Recommend to readers of mysteries, thrillers, suspense, science fiction, dystopian societies and artificial intelligence.