Book Review: The Forbidden Orchid by Sharon Biggs Waller

Release date: March 8, 2016
Author info: Website | Twitter | Facebook
Publisher: Viking
Pages: 392
Format: Hardcover
Source: Purchased
Buy the book: Barnes & Noble | Amazon | The Book Depository
Staid, responsible Elodie Buchanan is the eldest of ten sisters living in a small English market town in 1861. The girls barely know their father, a plant hunter usually off adventuring through China. 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. But now, even if she can find the orchid, how can she ever go back to being the staid, responsible Elodie that everybody needs?
I loved loved loved Sharon Biggs Waller's YA debut, A Mad, Wicked Folly, so I waited for her second novel, The Forbidden Orchid, with more than a little excitement. Sharon hasn't let me down yet!

I'm all about historical fiction, but my favorites always have strong female protagonists who like to challenge the norms of their time--and that's certainly the case for both of Sharon's books. In The Forbidden Orchid, Elodie realizes no one is going to help her family, so she does the unthinkable, and heads off to save them herself. It's noble and brave--and certainly more than a little foolish, but who can fault her? And watching Elodie's world become so much larger than the town she grew up in, as she's exposed to new people, places, and cultures and learns how to navigate them, we see her grow up. She's far from the person she left as, and it's all because she had the audacity to do for herself what no one else would.

There's so much history and commentary on show throughout that I'm sure I missed plenty. It's clear Sharon knows the world she's working with, and our backwards view, along with being shown the consequences of England's relationship with China, rids us of a lot of the romanticism that could've been--in a very good way.

My only complaint is that I wish much of the time when Alex and Elodie were bonding hadn't been glossed over. She mentions the time and how close they get, but we don't see much of it as it happens. The time after does well enough, but that original relationship building would have been good to see and would have made that time even more poignant and affecting.

In an unsurprising turn of events, I loved The Forbidden Orchid! It's a relatively quiet historical fiction that says and shows so much, and one that I'm afraid could be missed.


About the author:

Sharon Biggs Waller grew up around artists and developed a passion for Edwardian history and the Pre-Raphaelites when she moved to England in 2000. She did extensive research on the British suffragettes for her novel, A MAD, WICKED FOLLY when she wasn’t working as a riding instructor at the Royal Mews in Buckingham Palace and as a freelance magazine writer. She also writes non-fiction books about horses under her maiden name, Sharon Biggs. She is a dressage rider and trainer and lives on a 10-acre sustainable farm in Northwest Indiana with her British husband, Mark.

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