Diana Oliveira is in deep mourning over her mother's recent death as Serdar Özkan's The Missing Rose begins. She has stopped going to her law school classes and turned her back on her upscale, trendy friends. Then her world is further shaken when she opens her mother's deathbed letter to discover she has a twin she never knew about. This twin, Mary, had written to their mother, describing an intense longing to know Diana. Mary also describes the journeys she took to learn how to hear roses speaking and the comfort that gave her in her motherless state.
At first, Diana dismisses her long-lost twin as crazy--after all, who can actually talk with flowers?--but a series of strange coincidences involving a friend of her mother, a street artist and a beggar lead Diana to undertake a journey from Brazil to Turkey to find out about the language of roses. Although she starts this quest intending only to find Mary, she ends up finding herself along the way.
Fans of The Alchemist or The Little Prince will appreciate the allegorical, metaphysical language of The Missing Rose. The people and flowers who influence Diana are often cryptic, forcing her to think deeply about the nature of reality, love, death and individuality. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm