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Sour Flower, the unpublished feel-good coming-of-age novel by Maryanne Melloan Woods, contrasts the joys of teen friendship with the hardships of growing up in a broken family.
As a fourteen-year-old in 1970s San Francisco, Marigold (call her “M”) Hayes is fed up with her life.
M is very much aware of her role as the mature buzzkill in the family. Her parents, college dropouts and now divorced hippies, barely have it together. M often has to act as the mature adult for the sake of housing and basic necessities. With a spaced-out father who barely supports them and a mother who thinks her daughter is a square, it’s a miracle that M has kept her family afloat for so long.
When her English teacher suggests M apply to Barnum—an elite prep school offering scholarships to students in need—she dares to hope. Maybe this could give her a chance to pursue her dream of becoming a financially stable businesswoman.
But the application process poses its own challenges, one being an in-person interview with Barnum and her tragically embarassing parents. As she prepares her application alongside Philip and Gabi, her best friends who also come from broken homes, M must contend with a range of insecurities both childish and adult.
She stalks Barnum students to determine how she can fit in, sells her crocheted patterns at street fairs to make ends meet, and helps her friends see their own potential as she strives to find her writing voice for her application essay. M faces an uphill battle where the stakes for a young teenage girl seem impossibly high.
As a writer, Woods masterfully approaches the bildungsroman with equal parts levity and melodrama.
M makes a compelling and flawed protagonist. She extends her parental role to protecting her younger brother, making sure he gets every opportunity to experience the joys of childhood—often at the expense of her own. M’s ambition to break out of the conditions that hold her back propels her into the awkward antics and embarrassing mishaps rife in any well-penned young adult novel.
The backdrop of 1970s San Francisco’s hippie scene makes for a pivotal plot point, as M’s family butt heads with their stances on the Vietnam War unfolding in real time thousands of miles away.
A comedy of errors follows many of M’s sour-hearted decisions, but it’s precisely this trouble that draws people close to her personal authenticity.
As she begins to attain true maturity, M learns to embrace the contradictions in her life and in the lives of others. She discovers along the way that some of her so-called nemeses may be more like her than they’d care to admit. Fans of Louise Rennison’s Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series and Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird would find Sour Flower heartwarming in M’s aching desire to fit in, and in the lesson to take life a little less seriously while learning to accept all of its complexities.
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