Review: A FAIRYTALE ABOUT GRIEF: THE FLOWERS I DESERVE BY Tamara Jerée

The Flowers I Deserve is one of those books that does almost everything right, but sometimes you’re just a little too old for fairy tales.

By Percival P

Author's Note: I received an ARC for this book from Netgalley.

Editor's Note: This review has spoilers in it.

The Flowers I Deserve is one of those books that does almost everything right, but sometimes you’re just a little too old for fairy tales. 

Tamara Jerée has quickly become one of my favourite dark fantasy authors with her debut The Fall That Saved Us, a gorgeous dark romance between a shut-in angel who has recently escaped her celestial mission to hunt demons, and a succubus sent to tempt her into sin. 

Tamara’s prose sets her books apart from the pack with evocative prose and meditation on religious and parental trauma as well as tender, erotic sapphic romances that felt like forests made of guilt, yearning, temptation and genuine connection instead of two trees kissing because they’re girls for once. 

The Flowers I Deserve does read and feel like the same gothic forest but within a more fairytale-like setting. 

In a drought-ravaged and bitter kingdom, assassination is extremely common against the nobility, especially by an almost entirely deadly flower called the weeping luna. 

The only people immune from the poisons, called “poison girls”, are both in demand as taste testers by the upper class as well as feared and revered by the people and religious figures; depending on which side of the theology debate that is also explored within the text as per Jerée’s other works. 

After her mother dies, Carlotta finds out she’s a poison girl and after the death of her father, saddled with grief and a need for service and self-sacrifice, she makes her way to the king’s palace to become her taste tester. However, she realises that love of hot butch kings or other cute poison girls are not enough to literally unwrap the actual or metaphorical snake of grief for her parents from herself. 

Jerée’s prose is as lush and her style of worldbuilding comes out as naturally and unforced as it always did, but to me her focus on Carlotta and her father’s relationship was where this book shone best even as the romance falters. 

Her overprotective father bitter at the nobility for betraying his wife’s memory by leaving them destitute and unwilling to let his daughter leave but also unwilling to leave his own drought-ravaged land; until he dies and either turns or Carlotta adopts a little black snake who bites and clings with as much venom as her father. 

It’s an obvious metaphor but used relatively effectively especially as it stops Carlotta short of full emotional commitment to her king lover and her love for her fellow poison girls, both ghostly and living as long as her grief literally constricts her ability to love. 

The story meanders dream-like from emotion to emotion, mostly yo-yoing between guilt and grief and want; almost like a fairytale than a true-blue dark fantasy. 

Even the theology debates in the church Carlotta works in after her father dies and the discussions of the nature of poison girls and whether they are blessed or cursed doesn’t develop into anything particularly revealing. Rather it is only therapeutic or reassuring for Carlotta to go where she was already intending to go, rendering it superfluous since it never really comes back into play until a cursory mention at the end. 

Which is not a bad thing per se since so much of the story is deeply internal, a heroine’s journey worth of emotions; if it wasn’t for the fact that Carlotta doesn’t struggle per se or feels anything beyond the compulsive need for self-sacrifice or does not feel anything else in the five stages of grief that’s not wallowing in her guilt, which renders the story more of a fairytale and Carlotta a princess archetype.

This fairytale feeling also leaks into the main romance. 

The romance (s) are disappointingly flat and one-note, almost like stock tropes of a sexy fairytale but made for adults.  

Carlotta’s struggle or emotional landscape doesn’t alter or change because it’s not forced to interact with anything new or complex or even slightly less emotionally savory that tears or even makes a different design in this veil of grief and secrecy she hides herself in, and no one in this already tightknit polycule truly challenges her beyond the dead poison girl because everyone is immediately devoted to Carlotta. 

Lenora the servant is her immediate friend and devotee, King Emelia spends more time ailing in bed from the curse than she does with this girl she knows nothing about but she is enamored with immediately, the dead poison girl Anne is obsessed with her and whose reasons for her violent introduction never seems to go past her bitterness at being dead and an interesting spectral sex scene, a highlight in the book if not for the fact we don’t get much more interesting scenes from Anne and Carlotta. 

Even Phaela, the poetess who is Emelia’s oldest friend who at least would be an interesting angle in castle life or even a figure of conflict as she is shown to feel helpless in not being able to serve as a poison girl, treats her identically. 

Even as slightly more complex emotional struggles were revealed of all of those characters through Carlotta’s POV, the story suffers from its singular focus and the lack of multiple POV’s in separate chapters devoted to the other characters. 

The sex scenes are very hot but it is due to the strength of Jerée’s lyrical and erotically charged writing, since the characters’ dynamics are never even established enough to know why it seems that everyone wants to sleep with the newbie. 

Moreover, the fairytale, young adult-lite tropey nature of this story really starts to get pronounced. Everyone else who was not Carlotta was vague blobs or shapes. 

There are no politics, there are no complicated machinations, no power struggle; there is only a curse that needs to be broken and the drought is magically fixed. 

The noble tortured king, the devoted confidante, the poison girls all unanimous and identical in devotion to this king, all stock tropes or archetypes in a fairytale made for adults. And after that realisation, I started to emotionally disengage almost entirely, even as things started to change rapidly in the last 30% of the book.

Even as Carlotta faces the noble lord in whose service her mother died and left her and her father destitute; the lyrical prose remains deeply internal, still quagmired in the same grief and guilt and wanting to know more about her absent mother but by the second time she tries to engage with Earl Huxley’s poison girl Delfina, it was fairly obvious to the reader that she wasn’t going to get any. And yet Carlotta never shows more shades of emotion than what she is already been painted with, which makes the violence at the end an almost inconsequential and largely non-cathartic if not entirely unexpected act.

This I might have accepted as a larger point that murder does not abate the lack of closure for some losses if it wasn’t for Delfina’s letter; rendering it a neat little story where everyone lives uncomplicatedly happily ever after, curse broken, everything will heal now.

And on top of this, the last 90% of the book also never dwells in this act of what should be atleast a minor political inconvenience if not a catastrophe and quickly moves to the most Sleeping Beauty-like second climax, where Carlotta has to become the knight in shining armor now; wading through an emotional forest to remove the king’s curse where she faces her parents one last time to rescue her new family.

That would be an interesting inversion at the very least for the romance between her and the king if I cared too much anymore about the really pretty painting whose broad and obvious strokes of Carlotta’s character build hadn’t already been established many times over. - The book doesn’t maintain the reader’s interest through changing stakes or emotional exploration.

All in all, The Flowers I Deserve is an enthralling, sexy but simplistic fairytale, devoid of the edges and stakes missing from the author’s previous works.