Florence Gonsalves
Florence is the author of two novels, Love and Other Carnivorous Plants, and Dear Universe. She holds a BA in Philosophy from Dartmouth College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Virginia Tech. In 2020 she founded the Dandy Line Poetry Troop, a community arts typewriter project based in the New River Valley. More of her writing can be found on LitHub, Shenandoah, Pulp Mag, and Hobart.
Dear Universe
May 2020
It's senior year, and Chamomile Myles has whiplash from traveling between her two universes: school (the relentless countdown to prom, torturous college applications, and the mindless march toward an uncertain future) and home, where she wrestles a slow, bitter battle with her father's terminal illness. Enter Brendan, a man-bun- and tutu-wearing hospital volunteer with a penchant for absurdity, who strides boldly between her worlds—and helps her open up a new road between them.
Dear Universe is the dazzling follow-up to Florence Gonsalves's debut, Love & Other Carnivorous Plants, hailed by School Library Journal as "a must-have sharp, powerful, and witty immersion into the complexities of...mental health."
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Love & Other Carnivorous Plants
May 2018
Freshman year at Harvard was the most anticlimactic year of Danny's life. She's failing pre-med and drifting apart from her best friend. One by one, Danny is losing all the underpinnings of her identity. When she finds herself attracted to an older, edgy girl who she met in rehab for an eating disorder, she finally feels like she might be finding a new sense of self. But when tragedy strikes, her self-destructive tendencies come back to haunt her as she struggles to discover who that self really is.
With a starkly memorable voice that's at turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Love and Other Carnivorous Plants brilliantly captures the painful turning point between an adolescence that's slipping away and the overwhelming uncertainty of the future.
“Gonsalves’ debut is a pitch-perfect take on what happens when the future you imagined doesn’t live up to expectations, and every misstep seems to unravel the person you thought you’d become.… The struggle of holding on to an old friendship while discovering a new version of yourself should resonate with any reader." - Booklist Starred Review