Thank you to NetGalley and Kensington Books for providing me with this ARC to review.

Daisy’s mom has a new boyfriend, which means the teenager is once again having her life uprooted. This time the 15-year-old finds herself dropped off at her Grandma Rose’s home in the tiny town of Possum Falls, where Daisy is sure she will be spending the most boring summer of her life.

However, as Daisy becomes acquainted with her new town, she learns it is not as sleepy as it seems and is full of quite a bit of mystery. From her grandmother’s work in her funeral home where dark secrets are revealed in death to Daisy’s new internship at the local paper, it is not long before she starts to uncover what Possum Falls is hiding underneath its surface.

Things ultimately take a big turn when Daisy becomes intrigued by a dance hall explosion from 50 years earlier. As she begins to interview local characters about what happened that night, long held secrets start to unravel. Daisy finds herself making new friends – not to mention enemies – as she forces the townspeople to confront what happened that night. In doing so, she also forms an understanding with her grandmother she never would have anticipated.

Told from the alternating perspectives of various characters, The Flower Sisters is an enjoyable read. Both Daisy and her grandmother Rose are feisty and likeable, making it easy to get invested in both the story and their relationship.

For fans of unknown pieces of American history, this book is based on a true tragedy from the author’s hometown in 1928. This makes for an interesting plot line, as the author takes some poetic license to draw conclusions regarding what caused the small dancehall explosion, which killed 39 townspeople. The author does a good job respecting the story and its victims while shedding light on an interesting piece of history.

While most of the plot twists are a bit predictable, the story is intriguing enough to keep the reader engaged. The ending comes across both as a bit cheesy and as though the author was rushing to tie everything up in a pretty bow, but this is an overall enjoyable read for anyone looking to escape for an afternoon.

Compelling family drama spanning generations hearkening back to a tragic dance hall fire that triggers all of the events. A little long, but good characters and a good view on detailed, people oriented history.

A solid 4.5. It’s been a while since I’ve read a good family saga. This one is a saga, spanning generations. What I like most is the ordinary setting with ordinary people who have extraordinary secrets. I love the absolute real-ness of all our human failures and unseen victories. This is an ideal book for a grown up girl book club. It merges YA and adult realistic fiction, using the best aspects of both. Any reader from 16-96 would like it, honestly. It’s a little long for a classroom novel, but well crafted enough to pull examples of good writing from. Deception, romance, loss, joy, even some laughter. It’s well worth a read.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5879035862

A sweet but fairly unmemorable book based on the fallout from an explosion at a small-town American dance hall in the 1920s. I loved the idea of a book centred around this sort of story (which is loosely based on something that actually happened), and this one does start in dramatic fashion, following a group of excited teenagers as they head off to the ill fated dance. However, the plot from there is pretty obvious/contrived and I didn't feel like I ever really got past the surface of any of the slightly charicature-ish characters. A nice beach read for a holiday, but probably not something that I'm still going to mulling over in a few weeks time.

Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for an ARC in return for an honest review.

I am grateful to NetGalley and to Kensington Books for providing me with this ARC to review.
This is essentially a family story that goes back and forth, historically and generationally, between the 1920s and the 1970s, focussing on Rose and Violet, the Flower sisters of the title, and then on Rose’s daughter and granddaughter, Lettie (short for Violet) and Daisy. The central event took place when twins Rose and Violet were happy go lucky teenagers enjoying whatever bits of the Roaring Twenties touched their rural town in the Ozarks. On April 13, 1928, an explosion and its consequent firestorm blew away Lamb’s Dance Hall in that town, Possum Flats, Missouri. Located above a car dealership and repair shop under reputedly shifty ownership, Lamb’s was packed with much of the town’s youth.
Based on the historic event that consumed Bond Dance Hall in the author’s hometown of West Plains, her telling of what happened captures the nightmare scenario from the perspective of those who were caught in its midst. The death toll was horrifying for such a small tight-knit community. The beautiful Violet Flowers was one of the casualties; her boyfriend Dash survived with serious burns, a mangled foot, and the never-forgotten memory of helplessly watching her brutal death.
The storyline then moves to 1978. The widowed twin, Rose, never left Possum Flats, where she continues to run the family funeral home on her own. Her daughter Lettie, named Violet after her deceased aunt, fled the town and her family at the age of 16, returning many years later with her own daughter, Daisy. Lettie, who very much follows the hippie ethic of the time, simply drops off the teenage Daisy at the home of a grandmother she has never met and knows nothing about, so that she can head for California with her latest boyfriend for a fresh start and to allow him to get “used to the idea of fatherhood." She leaves Daisy with a promise to come back for her “soon,” leaving an address, but all Daisy’s letters return unopened.
Daisy hates the town and rejects her grandmother’s wary attempts to get closer. The defiant and angry Daisy goes to work at the local newspaper, where the editor eventually, though reluctantly, allows her to take on a “looking back” feature. Her discovery of a box of shocking photographs of the 1928 tragedy initiates her round of interviews with the survivors, including Rose. That process, in turn, tears open scars and exposes wounds that the survivors, and the town itself, had tried hard to erase. The individual stories lead to something much closer to the “truth.” The author builds suspense skillfully, as layer after layer is stripped away, leaving a shocking reality—but also permitting an opening to reconciliation as the story is restored to collective memory. Despite changing the place names and inventing the characters, the author has done her research, portraying the 1920s and the 1970s as transitional times where the changes in small-town America seem to overcome the continuities of centuries past.

Thanks to NetGalley, the author and publisher for chance to read this novel before publication, The author begins with the events surrounding an explosion and fire in a small town at a local dance hall. Then the rest of the story is set many years later and we meet some of the survivors and their descendants.
It’s very well written and I was intrigued by the characters and their actions through out the whole book.

I read a pre-publication edition of this book. The book is character driven, which works well since the characters are very believable and engaging. The plot is multi-faceted and well paced to hold the readers' interest throughout. From an editorial standpoint, the book is polished and free of structural flaws. I found the reading very enjoyable.

This book was a little hard to read because of going through so many different point of views. Would I read again? Definitely! Such a great little tragic story.

Blending history with fiction, Anderson, pens, a story of love, secrets, and family. In 1928, sisters, Violet and Rose are at a dance in their small town Missouri home. After a terrible fire, only one of the girls comes home. Flash forward 50 years and Rose finds her 15 year-old granddaughter has been left on her porch. Daisy is a curious young woman, who wrangles an internship at the local newspaper, where she learns about the tragedy that struck her family back in 1928. She becomes determined to uncover the truth about what happened that long ago night, but Rose doesn’t want those secrets revealed.