The Flower Sisters

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death by suicide, graphic violence, and death.

The Flower Sisters revolves around a tragedy that marks the Missourian town in which it is set: the dance hall explosion in 1928. To craft this story, Michelle Collins Anderson draws on a real-life tragedy that took place in her own Missourian hometown of West Plains: the Bond Dance Hall Explosion. This historical event and the tragedy depicted in the book share a number of details, making it clear that the latter draws on the former. Both take place on August 13, 1928, and the explosion causes 39 eventual casualties. Just as depicted in the novel, the final song that the band played before the explosion was “At Sundown.” Additionally, although the number of dead was definitive, the explosion left many bodies burned and charred beyond recognition, and the unidentified dead were laid to rest under a monument in the Oak Lawn Cemetery (Herbolsheimer, Chris. “The Tragedy of West Plains: The Unsolved Mystery of the Bond Dance Hall Explosion.” West Plains Daily Quill, 16 Feb. 2024).

Like Daisy, who has never heard of this shocking tragedy until she encounters it in the archives of The Picayune, Anderson, too, found out about the Bond Dance Hall Explosion much later in life. She spent the first 17 years of her life in West Plains but only discovered this piece of her town’s history in 2011, when her father gifted her a nonfiction account of the incident titled “The West Plains Dance Hall Explosion” (Cross, Greta. “Historical Fiction Novel ‘The Flower Sisters’ Explores West Plains Dance Hall Explosion.” Springfield News-Leader, 6 May 2024). Amazed that she had gone so long without being aware of such an event, Anderson conveys her sense of wonder and curiosity through the character of 15-year-old Daisy Flowers, one of the book’s protagonists.

Daisy is imbued with other autobiographical details as well. For example, her internship at The Picayune is inspired by Anderson’s own summer internship at the West Plains Daily Quill, the town’s local newspaper, which she also undertook when she was in high school. Like Daisy, Anderson began by writing obituaries for the paper, and her fascination with the dance hall explosion, which eventually inspired her to write The Flower Sisters, is paralleled by Daisy’s fixation with the dance hall tragedy that leads to her retrospective series in The Picayune.

While the original historical event and the reimagined version in The Flower Sisters share several similarities, Anderson does take creative liberties with some of the details for the sake of thematic exploration. For instance, one of the reasons for her fascination with the historic event was the fact that the cause of the explosion was never discovered. To this day, the tragedy continues to remain an “unsolved mystery,” with one possible explanation being that the dance hall was situated above a garage that housed hazardous materials (Herbolsheimer).

Although Anderson invents a reason for the explosion, Jimmy’s death by suicide and lack of explanation has the effect of retaining the mystery for the rest of the characters in the book, as they never learn who or what was responsible for the explosion. For the sake of her narrative, however, she draws on existing details to present a secret, fictional explanation: that the explosion is an act of rage born of shame. Anderson uses Jimmy’s story and the shame and guilt that follows him for the rest of his life to examine The Traumatic Effects of Shame and Secrecy, suggesting the power that secrets hold and the harm that they can impart. However, the novel’s conclusion also implies that coming to terms with difficult truths can lead to redemption and reconciliation (“Q&A with Michelle Collins Anderson.” Book Notions, 7 May 2024).