The Florist's Daughter

This New York Times Notable memoir of a middle-class, middle-America family is a “beautiful bouquet of a book” ( Entertainment Weekly ). They say “a daughter is a daughter all her life,” and no statement could be truer for Patricia Hampl. Born to a Czech father—an artistic florist—and a wary Irish mother, Hampl experienced a childhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, that couldn’t have been more normal, the perfect example of a twentieth century middle-class, middle-American upbringing.   But as she