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    Season of the Dragonflies: A Novel
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    Season of the Dragonflies: A Novel
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    Season of the Dragonflies: A Novel
    Ebook401 pages5 hours

    Season of the Dragonflies: A Novel

    By Sarah Creech

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    As beguiling as the novels of Alice Hoffman, Adriana Trigiani, Aimee Bender, and Sarah Addison Allen, Season of the Dragonflies is a story of flowers, sisters, practical magic, old secrets, and new love, set in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

    For generations, the Lenore women have manufactured a perfume unlike any other, and guarded the unique and mysterious ingredients. Their perfumery, hidden in the quiet rolling hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, creates one special elixir that secretly sells for millions of dollars to the world’s most powerful—movie stars, politicians, artists, and CEOs. The Lenore’s signature perfume is actually the key to their success.

    Willow, the coolly elegant Lenore family matriarch, is the brains behind the company. Her gorgeous, golden-haired daughter Mya is its heart. Like her foremothers, she can “read” scents and envision their power. Willow’s younger daughter, dark-haired, soulful Lucia, claims no magical touch, nor does she want any part of the family business. She left the mountains years ago to make her own way. But trouble is brewing. Willow is experiencing strange spells of forgetfulness. Mya is plotting a coup. A client is threatening blackmail. And most ominously, the unique flowers used in their perfume are dying.

    Whoever can save the company will inherit it. Though Mya is the obvious choice, Lucia has begun showing signs of her own special abilities. And her return to the mountains—heralded by a swarm of blue dragonflies—may be the answer they all need.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateAug 12, 2014
    ISBN9780062307576
    Author

    Sarah Creech

    Born and raised in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Sarah Creech teaches English and creative writing at Queens University of Charlotte. She is the author of the novel Season of the Dragonflies and lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her two children and her husband, poet Morri Creech.

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    Reviews for Season of the Dragonflies

    3.5/5

    55 ratings8 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I so wanted to like this one but it just fell flat for me. The description sounded like something I would just love and I kept waiting for it to really grab me but it never did. It was just ok and I guess I don’t really have much more to say about it.
    • 3/5
      Mix Practical Magic and Chocolat together and have it set in the Blue Ridge Mountains and you'll have a good idea what this book is about. Generations of women in the Lenore family have bottled the most alluring perfume that enables the wearers to succeed at anything they put their mind to. Senators, lawyers, musicians, doctors, and celebrities are just a few of the powerful jobs that women have obtained with the power of this perfume. Behind the powerful scent is a secret flower, a family of strong women, and just a hint of magic. After a divorce and failed career, Lucia moves back to the family home and business in the Blue Ridge Mountains. While there she discovers that her sister, Mya and her mother are facing troubles with some tricky clients and their beloved flower crop might be dying. Can they put aside all their differences and work together to save the family business from crumbling? A captivating read with enough intrigue to keep readers turning the pages. While the ending leaves a bit to be desired, the plot is unique and magical enough to almost make up for it.
    • 4/5
      When her marriage fails, Lucia, returns home to the family home in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where her mother Willow & Mya (Lenore) run the family business.

      The Lenore business is that of a making a secret scent that has been in the family's trademark for generations. The scent empowers those who are who are carefully chosen & groomed by the family for success.

      When Mya's lust for power & control of the business takes over, Mya makes several bad business decisions. Those decisions threaten to destroy the Lenore family & business forever and awakens Mya's Great-Grandmother's curse upon her.

      Not being able to trust Mya, Willow, subtly shifts the control of the business over to the unsuspecting Lucia.

      This is a wonderful book filed with magic, romance, & one too many happy endings. It was engaging, evocative and from the beginning to the end it held my interest.

      A delightful dose of Magickal realism.
    • 4/5
      If you took Patrick Suskind’s ‘Perfume’ and mixed it with Alice Hoffman’s, well, any of her books, you might come up with ‘Season of the Dragonflies’. In the 1920s, on a tropical island, Serena Lenore discovers a magical variety of gardenia, which not only smells divine but also amplifies a woman’s talents and gives her… something… that allows her to succeed beyond all others. Through the decades this perfume has been shared, secretly and profitably, with a very few women in all different trades. There are a few rules that Serena handed down; one was to never, ever alter the secret formula. The sales of this perfume has made the Lenore family fabulously wealthy, although they live without conspicuous consumption and put a lot of money into philanthropy. Willow has run the company alone for decades. When one of her daughters,Mya – who was the assumed heir to the company- goes behind her back and makes a deal with a client that blows up, the entire operation is in danger of failing. And when she performs some dark magic to repair things, it gets even worse. Can the recently divorced Lucia, who never had any magic in her and had no talent for mixing scents, help her mother and sister? During the book, things change dramatically for all three Lenore women. Their roles change, their relationships change, even their talents change. It’s a time of growth for them; sometimes very painful growth. It’s also a time of learning to let go and trust the universe. The story is well written enough although it does have a little bit of ‘first novelism’ in places- mainly in the romances. All three women find themselves involved with men who are almost too good to be true; it’s always hard for me to accept characters that have no flaws and when three of them appear in the same book it’s unbelievable- but then, this book *does* have magic as a reality in it, so perhaps this can be forgiven. The other thing I found a bit difficult was how easily the three women accepted the changes- major changes- in their lives. Still, I enjoyed the book a great deal and look forward to more by this author.
    • 4/5
      Season of the Dragonflies: A Novel by Sarah Creech arrived this morning. Very timely, since I had just finished and closed the covers of the book I had been reading. I opened the package, and then the book. This one took a few chapters to draw me in, but once it had, I read until I was finished.Magical realism and romance, great reading for a summer day, sitting in a rocker on the porch with my dog. The story of the Lenore family began in the late 1920's with a young woman named Serena and the man she fell in love with at first sight. Serena was eighteen years old the night she met Dr. Alex Danner.Serena's father had made a match for her with a man named Chase, a man that she knew she could never love. She was feeling hopeless until her eyes met those of Alex, across the dinner table, the vvery night that her engagement was announced. Serena and Alex made their plans quietly, in secret and departed from the harbor in New York, on their way to Borneo, where Alex, Dr Danner was going to study the healing properties of plants.Several years and two daughters later, Alex and Serena were coming back to the states. Taking one last walk before they departed what had become their home, the family came upon a circle of woman who seemed to participating in a sort of ritual around a plant, a flower that neither Serena, nor Alex had seen before. Serena felt compelled to enter the circle of women, and further, to enter the center of their circle. She reached out to touch the unusual flower, and it seemed to reach out to her, as well. The story goes, that she pulled the flowering plant from the earth, hid it in her hair, and carried it back to the United StatesSerena called her plant Gardenia potentiae, and it had the most beautiful fragrance of any flower she had ever seen. The family crossed the ocean to the states and the decided to settle in a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a place called Quartz Hollow. I was here that she established her family, and created what was to become the business that sustained the entire town, for many years, and many generations to come.Moving forward in time we meet Willow, Serena's granddaughter and Willow's two daughter, Mya and Lucia. Willow is the person in charge of the fragrance company that distilled what was considered to be one of the most intoxicating fragrances available anywhere. It seemed to have a magical quality that propelled the user to success in her chosen field. Mya worked with her mother, and Lucia had left the town to try her hand at acting. She seemed to have something to prove, to her family, and perhaps most of all to herself. This book Season of the Dragonflies is their story. The story of love, prosperity, magic and betrayal. It is a story of magic, death and mostly life and love.Recommended for fans of Sarah Addison Allen, an anyone who likes a good story of several generations of strong and wise, or not so wise, women. I will look for more books by this author in the future.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed this book but it did drag for me a little. The story line was fresh and the characters were well done. I love the dragonflies flitting in and out, I just wish it had a little more tug to keep me interested. Also it reminded me of Sara Addison Allen's Garden Spells, a must read if you like gardens and a little magic.
    • 5/5
      beautiful story. i enjoyed getting the different point of views from the characters.
    • 3/5
      Season of the Dragonflies by Sarah Creech was a great end-of-summer read. It leans more toward chick-lit than my usual choices. There are some interesting plot twists and a good build-up, but the big finish fell flat for me.This is the story of the Lenore women - ever since their matriarch made a bold decision and ran off an amazing adventure, they have nurtured a secret business, deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains. They cultivate a unique flower, a gardenia brought back from the Amazonian jungle, and turn it into the most expensive perfume on Earth. It is sold only to a carefully selected female clientele and it brings them wealth and power and success. Actresses, politicians, artists, CEOs - they have made their mark on the world with the help of the Lenore women and their secret elixir.But now, their empire is in jeopardy. Youngest daughter Lucia is home from New York, mourning her failed marriage and failing career. Elder daughter Mya, groomed to take over the business, is plotting behind her mother's back and making rash decisions. Their mother, Willow, can feel it all slipping away from her, and the news gets worse: the flowers are dying.For me, the most interesting part of the story was the interaction with the two young actresses receiving the perfume. There's real trouble brewing and the women are making some bad choices. The romances seem a little too convenient and the big climax a little contrived. While these women have managed their business for decades, suddenly things will grind to a halt without men in their lives - I really find that hard to swallow. I'm all in favor of romance, but this isn't really what I was looking for.

      1 person found this helpful