Book of the Month: Hot House Flower and the 9 Plants of Desire, by Margot Berwin

Lush, fecund, moist, sensual, voluptuous. These words all come to mind to describe the setting for Margot Berwin's debut novel, Hot House Flower and the 9 Plants of Desire. This semi-surreal adventure starts out in Manhattan, but in a sliver of the city dedicated to the care and cultivation of tropical plants. In this humid sub-culture we meet the protagonist Lila, a newly divorced advertising executive; a laundromat that doubles as a greenhouse; and two dueling tropical plant-devotees, David Exley and a man known only as Armand, who introduce Lila to the nine plants of the novel's title.

The second part of the narrative revolves around these nine mythical plants and Lila's obsessed quest to venture into the heart of the Yucatán rain forest to find them. While the plants play important supporting roles in this unfurling, the real star is the setting itself, a place where "murky, dank, dark, rotting jungle" magically opens onto bright blue sea and sky and white sand beach, and where ancient secrets unfold in surprising ways.

The novel identifies this setting as the Costa Maya, in the state of Quintana Roo, an unspoiled region at the southeastern tip of Mexico, about four and a half hours south of Cancún by car. Introducing the city girl to this wild locale, Berwin nicely grafts a New Yorker sensibility onto a wild tropics scene. On her first encounter with the sea, Lila describes the water as "so electric-blue it looked as if someone had dumped a vat of Ty-D-Bowl into it." When she first alights on the rain forest floor, she compares the sensation to walking on a trampoline. And when the sun—and the temperature—rises, she steams, "Walking in the rain forest was like walking under a hot shower that was originating from my own body."

Berwin vividly evokes the mosquito-loud, velvety blackness of a rain forest night, lit by the day-bright moon, and the cacophonic sunrise, all screaming macaws and monkeys shaking down coconuts and mangoes that make the ground thunder. And as Lila's escapades open to encompass scorpions, panthers, and pythons, shamans and charlatans, the pages suffuse with Costa Maya mystery.