Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author L.C. Chu to HJ!
Hi L.C. Chu and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, The Library of Flowers!
Please summarize the book for the readers here:
The Library of Flowers is an intergenerational story about a family of Chinese witches who can change emotions with perfume. Every eldest daughter has this gift, and in every fifth generation is the daughter who can wield the most powerful ability of all—to call one’s true love. Lucy is the fifth daughter, but when she fails, she leaves her family for a lonely life on the other side of the country. Her grandmother’s death means Lucy is forced to confront who she really is, and who she wants to be.
Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:
Lucy’s mother says this to Lucy: “The reason I wanted you home was because I love you. I wanted to help you when you were hurting, and I didn’t know how to do it from the other side of the country. How could I hold you when you were thousands of kilometers away? How could I calm you when you refused to pick up my calls? Support you when you closed off your life from me?”
Please share a few Fun facts about this book…
- As research for this book, I took perfume classes and bought my own kit to mix my own scents.
- I wear perfume every day, except if I’m under the weather. I collect fragrances, and my favourite scent is sandalwood.
- The Library of Flowers was originally written as a historical romance set in the time of Anne Boleyn.
- I also write romance as Lily Chu.
What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?
There is a romance sub-plot in The Library of Flowers, and Lucy and Rafe are childhood friends who grow apart due to a misunderstanding. Lucy is attracted to Rafe because of his kindness, and Rafe is in love with Lucy because of her ambition and dedication.
Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?
I had a few teary moments in scenes between Lucy and her mother.
Mom passes a hand over her eyes. “All I want is for you to be happy. I didn’t want you back home because of the store. I wanted you. I wanted to be in your life, the way all the other women in our family were in each other’s.”
For some reason, her low, sad tone infuriates me more. It’s like she refuses to understand that this is not all me or my fault, and the unfinished fury from the fight we had the other day surges back up. “Yeah, well, I wanted my mom. I wanted you to want me for who I was, not for what I could bring the family. I wanted you to love me, not what I could do for you.”
Readers should read this book….
If they want to experience an exploration of love, identity, and familial expectations. With added delicious perfume mentions!
What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?
I’m working on my next romance and women’s fiction. I have five releases in 2026, and coming up is The Vacation Shift (June 23), my first YA romance, and the print release of my cottage vibes rom-com, Rich Girl Summer (July 7). I also have a Christmas audio novella featuring characters from my K-pop rom-com, The Comeback. Just Kiss Already, my last Audible romance, featuring narrators Phillipa Soo and Simu Liu, was released in March.
Thanks for blogging at HJ!
Giveaway: A print copy of THE LIBRARY OF FLOWERS by L.C. Chu
To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: Have you ever felt your emotions change because of a scent, or have memories associated with specific perfumes?
Excerpt from The Library of Flowers:
The morning finds me standing in the dim apartment — gray clouds staining the sky the color of a faded shirt — and staring at my closet. Smelling my mother’s perfumes last night was like opening the floodgates. I woke craving a connection to what I lost when I left home. Mom is too direct and intimate a link, but those long-dead women from generations past can’t pressure me. I can’t disappoint them the way I have the women in my immediate family.
Yet simply taking out the register and starting to read makes me feel somehow like I’m letting Mom win. I pull the closet door back and forth, the suitcase blinking in and out of sight, until I eventually come to the conclusion that I’m being almost childishly immature. I want to read the register. There are no winners or losers involved. I open the closet fully and grab the suitcase, feeling as though I’ve grown, very slightly, as a person.
The stained ivory pages are almost limp with age and use, and lay out my family history starting from the days of Hua Aiai in the Tang dynasty, a distant millennium ago. It runs to the final, empty pages at the back, where my own story should be and isn’t.
Despite Mom’s skepticism, my Chinese is adequate enough to read the orderly columns of characters outlining the lives of 50 generations of Hua women. Other kids had fairytales as bedtime stories. I had the highlight reel from our family register. Some stories are so familiar I can repeat them by rote, such as my 13th great-grandmother watching her brothers being forced to grow queues when the Manchu overthrew the Ming. Others need three or four lines to jog my memory. Many I don’t remember at all.
I return to the page at the back of the book and let my finger slowly trace down the characters as I read, mouthing the words as I go to make sure I translate them correctly.
“I am Hua Aiai and the first of this line, which will be counted only among daughters. This is a record of my troubles so you may learn from this humble and ignorant woman. I leave here the words of the Peony Goddess, who came to me in a dream and told me the fragrances we create will be unique. She said my gift was to make hearts become whole. For my daughters, other gifts would stir.
I was born in the reign of Emperor Taizong…”
I turn to the first page, which has a few additional comments from Hua Zhengyi dating from 1953, with a straightforward explanation of changes in measurements from taels and catties to the new metric system, along with a laughably short side note that covers the end of the Qing dynasty, World War II, the rise of Mao and moving the family to Canada in 1950.
I pen this note far after my six years of work on our family register, she writes at the end. May I be forgiven any errors.
Six years of work. Good to know.
Then I turn the page, my initial reticence subsumed under an intense need to know everything about the women in my family.
What I soon realize is that there’s not a new problem under the sun. After an hour, I take a sip of cold coffee and stretch out my legs. I’m in the distant Yuan dynasty and poor Jing is worrying about not being found desirable enough to marry; how would she carry on the family line? If she does marry, what if her future husband is unkind or doesn’t wish to keep her girl?
There’s a note from Mom here. Better to leave the man than damage the daughter, she’d written.
Of course she’d say that. Huas need to protect their investments, after all.Other burdens echo through the generations. Fears of sickness, of strange lumps and unexplained bleeding. Worries that they’re getting too old to work, gnarled hands unable to handle the delicate materials. Concerns about no longer being able to contribute. Frustration about never being able to rest. Fury at having to hide who they are. Rage sits on the pages among the everyday updates of life, as if the anger itself was banal.
What none of them have — or at least, none that I’ve seen so far — is a lack of conviction. My ancestors, for all their differing personalities over a period spanning a thousand years, had one thing in common: an overwhelming confidence in their power as a Hua. I rub my eyes, remembering when I felt the same way. I knew exactly who I was and what I was born to do. Unlike them, it was taken from me. I don’t know whether to envy them their stability or pity their lack of choice.
That’s a lie. I know. I put the register away and drain my cup. It’s time for me to go to work.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Book Info:
For centuries, the Hua women have held sway over the courts of emperors and billionaires with their magical perfumes able to stir hearts and ensure fortunes. And in every fifth generation, an eldest daughter is born with the rarest gift of all: the ability to summon true love.
As a long-awaited fifth daughter, Lucy was supposed to be the miracle her exacting mother had been waiting for. But when her magic failed, Lucy fled Vancouver, her legacy, and the expectations that had nearly broken her. Now, years later, she runs a tiny perfume shop tucked away in Toronto’s Kensington Market—crafting beautiful, perfectly ordinary scents and keeping her extraordinary past firmly behind her. That is, until a death in the family brings her home…and saddles her with an unwelcome inheritance: the centuries-old Hua family register, brimming with secrets, formulas, and forgotten truths.
As Lucy unravels the stories of the women who came before her—including the mother whose complicated heart she never could understand—she must confront the tangled threads of love, power, and identity…and ask herself whether her magic was ever truly gone, or simply waiting for her to decide for herself what it means to be a daughter of the House of Hua.
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Meet the Author:
L.C. Chu, who also writes romance as Lily Chu, is the critically acclaimed author of nine books, including women’s fiction, romance, and young adult. Her romance books have been released in audio as Audible Originals, performed by Phillipa Soo, and translation rights have been sold in multiple languages.
She lives in Toronto, Canada, with her family, two cats, and far too many (yet not enough) books. Follow her on Instagram @lilychuauthor, or sign up for her newsletter at her website, www.lilychuauthor.com for news and updates on latest releases.
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