"I read it with deep appreciation for its message and for Trina Paulus' skill in communicating in words and pictures."
"Hope For The Flowers is one of my favorite children's book. Everyone is like a butterfly, they start out ugly and awkward and then morph into beautiful, graceful butterflies that everyone loves."
""Oh, I cannot explain the beauty I felt when I get all this, to make the most complex become the simplest – this is the summit of our ancient Oriental wisdom."
In Trina Paulus' book, Hope for the Flowers, two caterpillars get caught up in the fallacy of competition and struggle to reach the top of a caterpillars pile. By journey's end, however, they learn that their true nature, and that of every other caterpillar is not one of winning and being at the top, but of going within and emerging as beautiful butterflies who were born to soar. Like the caterpillars in that tale, very early on in our lives, we may have received messages that we must compete."
"A perfect book for anyone dealing with anything at anytime"
- Internet Review
"While it may hold the attention of a child, it is really an allegory geared towards adults. As it criticizes the mediocrity of those goals which seem so all-important to us at the time, it offers us hope for a much more satisfying existence."
- Epinions.com
"As I read the story the one thing that struck me was the manner in which the author almost perfectly recreated corporate life in the metaphor of a caterpillar’s life. As it turned out I was wrong. This book was NOT written with corporate in mind. It was the outcome of someone ’’sharing comfort with a friend who had just experienced death of someone close’’. Yet it had lent itself so beautifully to the purpose it was assigned (as course material in a business school) and to the imagination of its reader (myself)."
- Mouthshut.com Review
A bright yellow book with whimsical designs caught my eye in the library one day. As an aspiring children''s book author, I breezed through Trina Paulus'' "Hope for the Flowers" in only a little over 30 minutes and immediately fell in love with it. It is a story that children will love and adults could definitely learn from. It is a story of how two caterpillars, smartly named "Yellow" and "Stripe" discover what really matters in life. I believe the caterpillars'' adventures are symbolic of different trials that we have to undergo in our daily human lives.. the virtue of patience, the need to sacrifice, the importance of making decisions, the value of making mistakes (and learning from it!) and the unending power of love. At the end of this story, it is my hope that each reader not lose hope that there is a butterfly and a better person within each of us. May we continue to strive to bring out the best in each and everyone. As author Paulus says, this book is for adults and others (including caterpillars who know how to read). I highly recommend it.
-Originally published in Shvoong
"Women can be, and are, catalysts and perpetrators of improvement. It is our continual concern that in everything we do, we "Evoke" new thought, perceptions, and ideas, both in ourselves and in our audiences. In this piece, we wish to evoke hope; difficult, sometimes next to impossible, for our new generation to find in the current state of our power-filled, money-run, plastic, intolerant world. Without hope, we have to fight for the dear lives of our spirits, souls, and even physical selves. Thus, we are able to recognize the most pressing need to preserve hope and evoke it in as many people as possible.
-"Eveoke" Dance Theatre Program:
"Trina's 1972 tale, Hope for the Flowers, is one which my mother read to me on many occasions of my growing up, and was a natural choice for our company's goals with this production. It also enabled us to continue our exploration of imposed social doctrines that we began to deal with in Birth, Worth, and Hand-Me-Downs. Thus, Hope for the Flowers has become the second work in a trilogy of shows handling the important theme of Self vs. Institution. I am aware that people may find butterflies and fairies a bit fantastical, perhaps a bit unrealistic. But let us assure you, that in a world doused in ugly concrete, neon light, and acid rain; in a world of powerless people, repetitive cycles of hate an intolerance, rampant child, woman and minority abuse, frequent and growing occurrences of rape, AIDS, crack, guns, and impending Fascism, WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO BE AS FANTASTIC AS POSSIBLE TO FIND OUR WAY THROUGH THE RAT MAZE WE'VE LANDED IN AND BACK INTO A PLACE WHERE SPIRIT CAN STILL BE SPIRIT. ...This dance, born of ourselves, we hope will nurture the fantastical in all your hearts and minds."
- Gina Angelique
