Invasion of the Daffodils

During the Korean War, on a small island off the coast of California, Chico Flores scavenges a mysterious crate of daffodil bulbs that have washed ashore at Sucker’s Cove. He is delighted; he can sell the bulbs and make much-needed money to support his family. But these bulbs are different, alien even. They seem to click and hiss and have minds of their own, and when planted, they send up shoots unnaturally fast, swamping gardens, cracking through pavement, splitting the foundations of buildings. Very soon, the Island is facing a full-scale invasion, and as Chico and his family find themselves in the crosshairs of an irate community, the Islanders' long-standing rifts around race, class, and sexuality explode into the open. 

Piacentini’s lyrical novel about family, “invasion,” and heroism,  rifles through the tumult of love and the rubble of loss to examine the problems and possibilities of unexpected and inevitable change.

Piacentini’s Invasion of the Daffodils is a strangely haunting story of two brothers in a California island community in the 1950s. They are dealing with the angst of teenage longing, the difficulty of having a sibling serving in the Korean War, and the struggles of a family beset by the ordinary difficulties of survival—illness, aging, and the absence of money. The story remains true to these characters and their very real challenges while also introducing a magical element in the form of a box of daffodil bulbs that washes ashore. These are not ordinary flowers, and the bizarre way the plants inhabit the island—and the novel—becomes weirdly powerful. The combination of the insistently realistic with the overtly impossible makes the novel impossible to categorize. It’s not magical realism or surrealism. The novel feels at times like Roberto Bolaño’s dark dreamscapes, but the tone of Invasion of the Daffodils is too 1950s-America. It’s sort of like David Lynch meets John Steinbeck—if you can imagine that. I’ve never read anything quite like it, and that’s saying something. It’s a memorable, fascinating read, and it ought to find a wide readership. Piacentini writes beautiful sentences, and he burrows into his characters’ hearts and minds with insight and great clarity.”

—Robert Boswell, author of Tumbledown, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, and Mystery Ride

“Piacentini’s Invasion of the Daffodils is that rare novel that is totally immersive. His characters and prose are so finely integrated that the effect is a bit like scuba diving in a coral reef—you sense the fine and subtle balance of so many interrelated parts even as you’re dazzled by the immediate flash and bloom of the whole entrancing spectacle. I finished this thoughtful exploration of race, war, sexuality, family, and generational history with the strange sense that I’d become a local in the tight-knit, warring island community. And that’s the magic of this book: once you’re in it you’ll carry it with you, just as you do that place where you, yourself, came of age.”

—Alexander Parsons, author of In the Shadows of the Sun and Leaving Disneyland

“A timely snapshot of small-town alliances and bigotries, finely crafted into a story about all the ways that community can either come together or split apart. Piacentini writes with uncommon authority and grace, magic and realness, with landscape and characters so real it felt like I could climb into the book with them.”

—Jeni McFarland, author of The House of Deep Water

“I had two nights of dreams about Invasion of the Daffodils, which is a good sign of how it seeped into my heart and consciousness. Deftly combining history, family stories and magic realism, Invasion of the Daffodils introduces readers to a multi-generational Mexican-American family living in a shanty on a rugged island off the coast of Southern California.  As the Korean War rages on and touches everyone in their small town, the Flores family members weather internal and external perils that threaten to shatter their bonds to each other and to the windswept island. Author Dino Enrique Piacentini chronicles how untreated illness, addiction, death, grinding poverty, and stinging workaday racism slam the Flores family as relentlessly as the waves that pound the island’s shores. Through it all, the family strives to hold itself together. A boy confronts the fearful wonder of his budding sexuality. A young man burns with island fever and yearns to flee the claustrophobic island. An aging matriarch stumbles into the mists of dementia. A father crumbles beneath the pressures of sustaining his family, and a young daughter takes on his burdens. All the while, a magical plague of flowers…put the superstitious island community on edge with explosive results.”

—Jaime Cortez, author of Gordo

“Unflinching and lyrical, Piacentini’s Invasion of the Daffodils is like if One Hundred Years of Solitude was conceived of on the California coast.”

 —Erika T. Wurth, author of White Horse