Beds Are For Flowers by R.K. Gold
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
So, yeah, I know it’s not always kosher to rate your own book but so far the Goodreads community hasn’t minded. For those unfamiliar with my ratings, I like to give a kind of letter from the author in the review section so people can gain a bit of personal insight into what my work means to me.
Beds Are For Flowers was originally going to be a middle-grade book. The main character was going to be nine and his father was going to turn into a tree in the end. I had this beautiful idea in my mind that becoming one with nature was the highest level of enlightenment a person could achieve and Clarence would be able to climb his father’s tree every day and feel connected to him.
I didn’t go in this direction. Since the book deals with reapers, monsters, and death I thought it might be better to make Clarence thirteen. I put a lot of thought into what makes life so beautiful, and I know even a book couldn’t come close to an answer, but when I think of beauty I obviously jump at low hanging fruit like color and sound. So, when the world lost its life in this story, color and sound were among the first casualties. I imagined a gray, twisted, shell of the world we all know, sort of inspired by Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi “you paved paradise, put up a parking lot.”
Balance is one of the main themes in this book. Paradise and the mortal realm are two sides of the same coin and when one gets sick the other suffers. This is going to make me sound like such a hippy but I guess I wrote this as an ode to the innocence of nature. It doesn’t try to be beautiful, it just is, and we turn our backs on it too often for our own convenience, preferring a road to a forest.
I hope this insight makes some sense. I’m worried it sounds like a ramble.
Anyway, I hope you like the book and I’m always interested in more ARC readers.
Thanks for your interest.
-R.K. Gold
R.K. Gold 