Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus

Photo taken from: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/96629.Hope_for_the_Flowers

Incredulously, books for children are books that really captivate my heart. They absolutely lingers forever just like an after taste, a scent and a touch. You can never escape them because they have been a part of you the moment you have opened them and even after you have closed them and put them in the bookshelf. Yup, I can say that children books have a life of their own. They stalk you, hunt you and mesmerize you… (mind you, in a good way!) That’s how powerful they are.

Hope For The Flowers, Ate Ivy's favorite book, is one of these children books. It is about Stripe and Yellow. It speaks of their adventures in life, their struggles to become a butterfly and the hope that they can become something way beyond their imagination. Ironically speaking, this book may look so shallow because of its thinness, shortness, child-liked appearance and the caterpillars-butterflies characters but if you digest its wholeness from the ink to the cardboard cover, it can satisfy your hunger until you die. It is very profound and intimidating at the same time. However, what I admire most about the author of this book, Ms. Trina Paulus, is that she has presented three approaches in dealing with the unknown (life) using caterpillars and butterflies. She has made a very complicated and intricate topic in a simple easy way to grasp.

The Characters: 

1. Stripe, a male butterfly who symbolizes the people who can never get enough and so they try everything to satisfy their craving in answering their own questions. They passionately experience everything so that in the end they will never have any regrets but just memories and experiences stored in their memory vault. They are very adventurous and independent. 
2. Yellow, a good-hearted female butterfly who symbolizes the people who know what they don’t want, who don’t need to experience everything because deep down their hearts they know that it will not lead to something wonderful and that they are only wasting their time if they do so. They ask for people’s opinions, they use other’s experience as learning experience and so they never experience the mistakes that other people went through. They stick to what they believe in even if sometimes it hurt them… they have convictions.
3. The other caterpillars symbolize people who just go with the flow, who never questions life, who just do what they are told and who never decide for their own. Some have crab-mentality.

Favorite Lines:

“What looks like you will die but what’s really, you will live..”

“Imagine I didn’t even know I could do this. That is some encouragement that I’m on the right track…” 

“Yet somehow waiting and not being sure was better that action she couldn’t believe in..”

Lessons:

This book is about hope… It tells us that if we believe in something, we can reach it, attain it and hold it in the palms of our hands. Indeed, there will be struggles, hardships and pains but if continue to believe… anything is possible just like how Yellow and Stripe proved to us… Because we are equipped with everything we need to live the dreams we once dreamed of.