Such Pretty Flowers

I received a digital advance reader’s copy of Such Pretty Flowers by K. L. Cerra via NetGalley. Such Pretty Flowers is scheduled for release on February 7, 2023.

Such Pretty Flowers begins with Holly receiving a text from her brother. She doesn’t respond immediately to his somewhat cryptic message, which she regrets when he is found dead that very night. Holly has a lot of questions about the presumed suicide, and begins to move into her brother’s world in search of answers. She finds herself sucked into the sphere of Maura, Dane’s recent fiance, and begins to fear for her own safety in Maura’s floral world.

Holly as a character is a bit adrift in this story. She has a job (not one that she is particularly invested in), a friend (who is absent for much of the story due to her own life), and parents (who are absent due to their grief over the loss of their son). For me, this made it a bit hard to see Holly as a detailed person, as her interactions with the world around her were almost exclusively related to her brother’s death and Maura. The relative absence of the people around her also made it difficult to see them as well-developed characters.

This novel is a gothic story, giving us a creepy house and potentially deadly plants. The house comes loaded with Maura’s band of semi-worshippers, a group of people who seem mildly sinister and loaded with secrets. Overall, there is the sense of mystery and danger, though the elements were relatively predictable, rather than surprising me with fresh takes or nuances on those elements.

I had the same feeling with the plot of the story. I was able to see what was coming next, with no surprises in the turns of the story. I also felt that some of the choices made by the characters in the last half of the novel were not based on the characters themselves, but were made to move the story in the direction the author wanted.

Overall, Such Pretty Flowers delivered on the gothic vibes it promised, but didn’t bring anything new or surprising to the story.