The Flower Sisters

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child death, death by suicide, and racism.

The Flowers Sisters unfolds across two timelines: 1928, when the dance hall explosion takes place, and 50 years later. The entire narrative is focused on showing that the grief and trauma of this event leads several key characters to lead lives of desperate isolation for a plethora of personal reasons. While Anderson examines the lingering impact of the tragedy on the town as a whole, this exploration focuses primarily on the Flowers women—Rose and Violet, the eponymous Flowers sisters, and Violet’s daughter and granddaughter. At the outset, Anderson establishes the existence of the Flowers family’s collective loneliness and sense of detachment from the community. Daisy comes to live with her grandmother, whom she initially knows as “Rose,” for a summer, but she has never met her grandmother before because her mother, Lettie, left home as a teenager and has not stayed in touch with the family. When Daisy arrives, Rose, too, is revealed to have led an equally solitary existence for years; her husband and in-laws are all dead, and she runs the funeral home alone.