Review: Some Wildflower in My Heart
Jamie Langston Turner’s Transparent Yet Moving Novel
Some Wildflower in My Heart by Jamie Langston Turner is a story about everyday lives that are lived on the burial grounds of the past. Most of the primary characters in the novel have secret troubles and sorrows but their stories are shared on the common and mundane turf of daily life rather than on the dramatic turf of disaster.
The Narrator with An Unusual Voice
The story is told by Margaret Tuttle an intelligent, well read, and extremely reserved woman who is anything but friendly to those around her. Margaret tells us in the opening paragraphs that “My passion is reading. I am haunted by phrases from things I have read and by things I have seen and done as well, though I prefer by far the haunting from things I have read.” In truth, not only is her life haunted by what she reads but so is her vocabulary and her rather stilted manner of speech.
However, Margaret’s reserved even hostile attitude towards those around her and her rather ungracious presentation of other people lends credibility to the singular central character, Birdie Freeman, whose Pollyannaish approach to life makes her seem too good to be true.
An Unhidden Plot
Margaret tells the story as she writes it. In fact, while she intends for the story to be written as a publishable book, it rambles in the manner of a personal journal. She freely gives up the plot of her story in order to focus on characterization and personal revelation. At the end of the first chapter, she tells us “I already see the pall of death upon my book.” Her comment foreshadows not only the end of the novel but also significant events in the novel.
While Margaret’s personal revelations seem predictable and clichéd, her characterization of those around her is delightful and refreshing. She reveals the lack of physical beauty and juvenile behavior in those around her in a manner that is funny and yet poignant, especially, when those observations are paired with her fair although unsympathetic assessment of character in those same people.
Throughout the book, Margaret references how transparent and unbelievable the story she is relating must seem. Yet she continues to tell it and thus disarms the critical reader who finds it easier to sit back and enjoy the narrator’s facility with language and laugh at the almost comical intensity with which Margaret repels the friendly advances of those in her life. Knowing that the plot is not intended to be a mysterious unveiling but rather a step-by-step map to a foreseen conclusion allows the reader to relax and be less judgmental.
Circumstantial Evidence and Coincidence
While the story is intentionally predictable and the central character almost unbelievably good-hearted, there is the lovely, un-expected threading of blue flowers and wild flowers throughout the story in those funny little coincidental moments that Christians attribute to God. From this tenacious flower we grasp the true strength of the story. The strength found only in weakness and the beauty found in what is flawed and a Savior who glories in and glorifies both the weak and the plain.
For Those Who Need Healing
The abrupt and tragic ending doesn’t culminate in the immediate conversion of Margaret Tuttle. It simply provides the stimulus for more growth. While the true ending is hinted at, Turner doesn’t tie the story up in a moral little bundle but rather leaves the reader room to draw his own conclusions.
It is a story that will resonate in the lives of those who have a past from which they seek healing and sanctuary, which is, indeed, all of us.
Turner, Jamie Langston. Some Wildflower in My Heart. Bethany House Publishers, 1998. ISBN 978-0-7642-0296-4
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