Love and other carnivorous plants

Overview

Florence Gonsalves's novel follows Danny through a first year of college that refuses to match the glossy expectations she arrived with. Instead of the triumphant reinvention she imagined, she finds herself failing her pre-med coursework, watching a long-standing friendship quietly dissolve, and losing hold of the identity markers she had built her sense of self around.

Into this unmooring comes an unexpected attraction: an older, more worldly young woman Danny knew from a stint in eating-disorder rehab. The relationship feels, at first, like a door opening onto a version of Danny she hasn't yet met, a possibility outside the roles of student, daughter, and friend that have stopped fitting.

That fragile momentum is disrupted by a sudden tragedy, which reawakens the self-destructive impulses Danny had hoped were behind her. The remainder of the book follows her attempt to sit with grief and relapse long enough to figure out, on her own terms, who she actually is.

Identity in Freefall

Gonsalves's novel belongs to a strand of contemporary young adult and new adult fiction interested in the gap between the life a character is supposed to want and the one she actually finds herself living. The Harvard setting is less a backdrop of prestige than a pressure chamber: an institution built on the promise of a settled future that instead accelerates Danny's sense of dissolving.

The book is also notable for treating recovery from disordered eating as something ongoing rather than resolved offstage before the story begins. Danny doesn't leave rehab and become well; she leaves rehab and keeps negotiating with the same impulses under new pressures, which is part of what gives the novel its unsentimental edge. Her attraction to another woman she met in treatment complicates recovery further, since the relationship is entangled from the start with the very context both women were trying to heal from.

Read alongside other coming-of-age novels that resist tidy arcs, the book sits closer to case study than morality tale, less interested in delivering Danny to safety than in rendering, honestly, what it feels like to lose your footing in real time.

Why Love and Other Carnivorous Plants Has Been Challenged

Most objections to the novel cite its suitability for high-school-aged readers, arguing that its frank treatment of disordered eating risks normalizing or even instructing the behavior it depicts rather than warning readers away from it. Critics raising this concern point to the level of detail around Danny's eating disorder and its treatment as more clinical than a young audience needs.

A second, closely related objection concerns the novel's depiction of Danny's same-sex attraction, which some challengers argue is inappropriate content for teen readers regardless of how it is handled narratively. Others have flagged the book's frank language and its portrayal of self-harming behavior in the aftermath of tragedy as excessive for a school library setting. Taken together, these objections track the book to 1 state and 1 school district within the records this catalog maintains, reflecting a narrow but persistent concern with how much psychological and sexual candor a book aimed at teenagers should be allowed to carry.