Picking Daisies on Sundays
48 pages • 1-hour read
Liana CincottiPicking Daisies on Sundays
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and bullying.
Overcoming Fear to Embrace Love
The novel presents love as complicated, especially through how Dani and Levi’s relationship develops alongside their experiences with grief. For Dani, loving someone doesn’t always come easily, and her feelings for Levi change over time as experiences affect her understanding of their relationship. Dani’s love for Levi is long-standing, and even when it’s been interrupted by misunderstandings, loss, and their own mistakes, that love has endured, remaining foundational to how Dani and Levi see each other and themselves. Dani has gone through a lot since their misunderstanding split her and Levi apart, and the novel illustrates how an authentic, loving relationship requires trust, maturity, and an ability to overcome one’s fear and embrace love.
Before she and Levi even met, grief played a part in how Dani approached love. After losing her father, she came to terms with the permanence of his absence, realizing, “[T]hey aren’t just gone for a moment, but they’re gone for the rest of your moments” (57). She brings this understanding, the product of guilt and loss, into all her relationships, including her friendship with Levi. She holds back, unwilling to make herself vulnerable, because she can’t imagine going through the grief and loss of losing another loved one. She fears losing someone she depends on again, and she hides her feelings out of an impulse toward self-protection. She would rather miss out on love than risk the grief that would result if she ever lost Levi.
At the same time, Dani creates her own barriers, compounding the problem. Her revealing comment, “I wasn’t allowed to love him” (105), illustrates how the obstacles to their relationship are mainly in her own mind. No one is stopping her, but she convinces herself that loving Levi is off limits, a barrier that she has set up to avoid getting hurt. This perspective drives all of Dani’s actions during the early stages of their rekindled friendship and distorts how she interprets everything between them. Even when Levi shows obvious signs that he’s in love with her, she second-guesses it, assuming that she’s reading too much into it. Her unwillingness to trust her own feelings and embrace the vulnerability of love keeps her stuck, preventing her from fully experiencing the relationship as it develops.
By the end of the novel, Dani’s perspective begins to shift to a more mature, grounded view of love. When she and Levi reunite, she reflects, “At twenty-two, I fell in love with him because of how he made me feel” (275), illustrating a more mature understanding of love that leaves their past relationship behind. She stops filtering everything through fear or past misunderstandings and allows herself to recognize what is right in front of her. Dani and Levi’s relationship shows that love doesn’t always happen in a single moment but requires a willingness to let go of the past and fears of grief and loss, highlighting the novel’s argument that love requires letting go of the past and a willingness to trust one’s emotions.
Listening to One’s Instincts as a Path to Self-Discovery
Cincott’s novel begins with Dani at a pivotal juncture in her life. As she prepares to graduate from college and take the next step toward becoming a fashion designer, she carries the pressure of entering the adult world while still trying to figure out who she is. She expresses this disconnect when she comments, “I thought your twenties were supposed to be about finding yourself and traveling the world and making these big career moves—not missing a guy from high school, eating pizza on the couch, and still crying over teenage insecurities” (186). Dani struggles to find her place after college, but over the course of the novel, she discovers that self-discovery requires listening to one’s own instincts and determining one’s own self-worth.
Dani’s journey of self-discovery requires her to pay attention to her own judgment and stop listening to others’ opinions of her. The stress of completing her final project exposes the fact that one issue tied to her identity crisis involves redefining her sense of her physical self. Dani internalized the cruel comments that people made about her body in high school, and she has carried them with her ever since. She doesn’t see herself as attractive, and that belief distorts both how she presents herself and how she approaches her designs. Dani’s reunion with Levi forces her to confront these beliefs. He rebukes her negative self-talk and helps her shift her perspective on herself. He consistently affirms her talent and encourages her to take risks, pushing her beyond the limits she has placed on herself. As external pressures mount from Ethan’s criticism and the uncertainty surrounding her future, Dani begins to push back against others’ views of her, with Levi’s support making her feel more confident about trusting her own perspective.
This tension also manifests in Dani’s work. She’s comfortable designing for others but not for herself, keeping her designs at a distance that reflects her sense of disconnection from her body and identity. In addition, her insecurity limits her professional creativity, leading her to play it safe rather than take risks. However, as she begins to recognize that the version of herself she has accepted may not actually be true, Dani engages with her work in a new way. When she admits, “It’s like I’ve been drained of all creativity and now all that’s left in my mind are quilts composed of past projects. I haven’t created anything original or worth sharing in a while” (117), she realizes that her thought patterns are affecting her art. As she reconsiders what she’s always believed about herself, those beliefs begin to fall apart, helping her understand the connection between herself and her art in a new way.
As Dani begins to challenge these negative self-talk patterns, she sees how this mindset has held her back. Instead of letting fear and self-doubt dictate her choices, she begins to change her approach to her career and her perspective on herself. Her decision to design for herself and step into her own work reflects this shift. By placing herself at the center of her designs, she reconnects her work with her identity and signals a new acceptance of her body. Dani’s journey illustrates the danger of relying on others for one’s sense of self. To build a strong foundation for her new, adult identity, Dani must first learn to prioritize her own perspective on herself rather than seek external validation.
Growing Up by Letting Go of Expectations
A large part of growing up is recognizing the difference between the idealized life that one has dreamed of and what is actually possible. Dani’s life hasn’t been easy, and she hasn’t moved through it with unrealistic expectations or naïve optimism. Still, she often struggles to reconcile what she thinks should happen with what does, especially when she feels like she isn’t in control. Along her journey toward maturity, Dani learns to leave her expectations for life behind and move forward into reality.
Early in the novel, Dani tends to filter her experiences through narratives that give her a sense of order, even when they don’t reflect what’s really happening. When Jia says, “[T]his is too early in the romance movie plot for you to be confessing your love” (185), she reflects Dani’s own impulse to reduce her life to predictable storylines, giving her a false sense of control. Dani has very specific ideas of how her relationship with Levi should develop, but this limited thinking keeps her passive and waiting for the “right” time instead of expressing her honest emotions. It also creates a distance between her expectations and reality because her life isn’t a movie and doesn’t follow a script. As a result, Dani often misses opportunities to be direct, which contributes to the misunderstandings that define much of her relationship with Levi.
This tension between Dani’s expectations and reality becomes more pronounced as she begins to question the beliefs that she’s relied on. She admits, “The truths I thought I used to know were tearing at the seams” (168), and this metaphor exposes a shift as she begins to understand how her idealized expectations are limiting her life. The narratives that she’s built about love, rejection, and her own limitations no longer hold up against what she’s experiencing. This forces her to confront the possibility that she has been misreading her life, not because reality has changed but because her interpretation of it has been flawed, filtered through her expectations.
Dani steps into maturity by moving beyond these imagined frameworks and engaging with what’s real, even when it’s uncomfortable. She recognizes, “I couldn’t continue to go through life dreaming and never moving forward” (275), a turning point in how she approaches both her relationships and her future. Instead of waiting for life to match her expectations, she becomes an active agent in her own life rather than watching it like a spectator. The novel highlights the idea that idealism and expectations can offer comfort, but they can also limit growth when they replace reality. Dani’s journey shows that maturity comes from letting go of rigid expectations and learning to respond to life as it unfolds, rather than as she imagined it would be.
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