The Forbidden Orchid
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
The adventures of a British girl in China, hunting for the orchid that will save her family.
Staid, responsible Elodie Buchanan is the eldest of ten sisters growing up in a small English market town in 1861. The girls barely know their father, a plant hunter usually off adventuring through China, more myth than man. Then disaster strikes: Mr. Buchanan reneges on his contract to collect an extremely rare and valuable orchid. He will be thrown into debtors’ prison while his daughters are sent to the orphanage and the workhouse.
Elodie can’t stand by and see her family destroyed, so she persuades her father to return to China once more to try to hunt down the flower—only this time, despite everything she knows about her place in society, Elodie goes with him. She has never before left her village, but what starts as fear turns to wonder as she adapts to seafaring life aboard the tea clipper The Osprey, and later to the new sights, dangers, and romance of China. She comes to find that both the world and her place in it are so much bigger than she’d ever dreamed. But now, even if she can find the orchid, how can she ever go back to being the staid, responsible Elodie that everybody needs?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Seventeen-year-old Elodie's adventurousness and intellect outpace the constraints Victorian England places on women her age. The oldest daughter in a family of 10 women, Elodie takes on responsibility for everyone when her mother falls ill, and her perpetually absent father jeopardizes them all when he fails to retrieve a rare, expensive orchid for the man who finances his plant-hunting expeditions to China. Elodie risks everything to help her father return to China and pay off his debts by stowing away on a tea clipper with the help of a handsome young Russian named Alex. Once Elodie arrives in China, Waller (A Mad, Wicked Folly) creates a vivid portrait of the country's landscape and history and the restrictions women faced there, too through Elodie's observations and via her new friend, Ching Lan. The discordant relationship between England's fascination with China's many unfamiliar treasures and the Victorian desire to conquer is also front and center. Elodie and Ching Lan are feminists of their era, refusing to bend to the rules and limits placed before them. Ages 12 up.
Customer Reviews
Absolutely amazing!!!!!!
This book is honestly one of the best books I have read!! I am into historical fiction but I find it hard to find a book that I am fully into. This book enticed me from the I side out and I would definitely recommend it!!! I have also read A Mad Wicked Folly and these are now my two top favourite books!!! PLEASE keep writing Sharon!