The title of the new Amazon offering “The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart,” with its echo of V.C. Andrews’s Gothic novels of family calamity, is a case of truth in advertising. “Lost Flowers” is a reminder that when it is handled with skill, sophistication and a measure of restraint, melodrama can be as satisfying as any other style of storytelling. June is one pole of a story in which the keeping of shameful family secrets is the foundation of tragedy. The other pole is Alice, who is a child when we first see her (played by Alyla Browne) and knows nothing about June, her grandmother.

---

Persons: Alice Hart, Holly Ringland, Sigourney Weaver, Leah Purcell, Frankie Adams, Alice, Alyla Browne, Savage Locations: Thornhill, June’s