Each year, nearly 20,000 young people “age out” of America’s foster care system, and many of them have nowhere to go. Writer Vanessa Diffenbaugh has transformed this sad statistic into an extraordinary debut novel.

The focus of a fierce bidding war among publishers, The Language of Flowers tells the visceral and deeply touching story of Victoria, a teen who has been discharged from foster care, leaving her alone and emotionally barricaded. It’s also a compelling story about spiritual hunger and the power of nature—and human connection—to help heal hearts.

“My book is helping to tell a story that needs to be told.”

“It came pouring out of me,” Diffenbaugh says of the six-month process of writing the book. “It was about a year and a half from the time I started it to the time I sold it. Pretty quick for a first-time novel and a bunch of kids in the house,” Diffenbaugh laughs, as she juggles a bit of background chaos, plus kids and a babysitter’s schedule, at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Set in San Francisco and Napa Valley, The Language of Flowers draws heavily on Diffenbaugh’s upbringing in Northern California, with its fertile farms and vineyards, as well as her experience as a foster parent. Born in San Francisco, she studied creative writing at Stanford and taught art and writing to young people in low-income communities before becoming a full-time parent. She and her husband, PK Diffenbaugh, have two biological children, and have fostered children throughout their marriage. They recently moved from California to Cambridge, first dropping their foster son Tre’von, 18, at New York University, which he is attending on a Gates Millennium Scholarship.

In the novel, Diffenbaugh takes two strands—nature and created family—and spins them into an absorbing story that is as complicated and exhilarating as any human relationship. But instead of reading like a polemic disguised as fiction, The Language of Flowers is full of startling and masterful dialogue, intense, emotional scenes that crackle and come alive as they unspool, and flawed yet sympathetic characters.

“As you can tell, I’m passionate about two things: writing and helping kids in foster care,” Diffenbaugh says. “I could recite statistics that would blow your mind about what is happening to these kids, especially as they emancipate from the system—25 percent become homeless within two years—but you’re not going to . . . feel empowered to do something about it if you haven’t had some kind of connection with a story that helps you feel on an emotional level. My book is helping to tell a story that needs to be told.”

Narrated by Victoria in flashbacks, the novel follows her life as she bounces from one foster situation to the next until she’s emancipated from foster care at 18. Her most significant relationship is with Elizabeth, a gardener who grew up on a Northern California vineyard and is now estranged from her family. Elizabeth introduces her to the Victorian-era symbolism of flowers and their secret meanings, and Victoria embraces it as a way to express difficult emotions to the adults in her life. She describes the situations that led her to become an often abrasive young adult, the self-sabotage that left her homeless in a San Francisco park, and the twists of fate that lead to her work with a high-end city florist and her guarded relationship with a Napa Valley farmer who understands her secret language like no one else. 

From the smell of warm summer fruit to the sounds of a busy farmer’s market on a Saturday morning, every scene in the novel feels authentic and immediate. (Red Wagon Productions has optioned the book for a film adaptation.)

Diffenbaugh says the truth about foster care lies somewhere between the frequent demonization of foster children in the media and the rosy picture of fostering a child portrayed in the film The Blind Side. 

“We’re all human and we’re all struggling. I didn’t want to end the story tied up with a ribbon, but it’s possible for people to change, it’s possible for people to overcome, it’s possible for people to reconnect even when they’ve been so hurt,” she says. “I wanted to show the whole picture.” 

While she’s already working on her next book, Diffenbaugh is also launching a new organization, The Camellia Network, to help build support for young adults leaving foster care. “I think it’s one of the most pressing and most disastrous issues facing foster care right now,” she says.

“In the language of flowers, camellia means ‘my destiny is in your hands,’ and the idea is that we’re all interconnected. The destiny of our country lies in the hands of the youngest citizens.”

A mother is torn between protecting her son and telling the truth in Carla Buckley's thought-provoking, suspenseful third novel, The Deepest Secret. Eve has spent the last 15 years fighting to keep her son safe from sunlight—he has a rare genetic disorder, XP. But one rainy night, a car accident changes her life forever, and Eve's conscience and her motherly love are put to the test. We asked Buckley a few questions about her new book.

What was the initial inspiration for this book?
When my son was 16 and had just gotten his driver’s license, I had mixed feelings as I watched him drive away that very first time. He’d worked hard and proven himself to be responsible and I was proud as I watched him carefully back the car out of our driveway. But I also felt sad. He wasn’t just driving himself to his guitar lesson. He was taking a critical first step to becoming a man and leaving home forever. I began to wonder what it would be like to mother a child who could never reach this sort of milestone. After all, it wasn’t as though my son’s teen years had been completely uneventful. He didn’t want to be treated like a child anymore but I knew he wasn’t ready for complete freedom. We’d both learned through trial and error where to draw the line and we’d both made mistakes. It occurred to me that this normal, turbulent, and always challenging period of a boy’s growing up would be complicated immeasurably if he had a medical condition.

"I hope my readers recognize themselves in my characters and ask themselves what they would do if faced with the same issues."

Your stories often center on family conflicts and dynamics. What is it about this subject that interests you?
I guess the easy answer is that I came from a dysfunctional family and that I’m still working through the lessons of my childhood, but I’ve come to believe that we all come from dysfunction in one way or another! I think the reason I’m drawn to talk about family dynamics is because it’s the universal language we all speak: We all have families and our roles within them shape us into the people we become. It seems a particularly fraught and vulnerable process. What if you make a mistake—can you ever undo the damage? What if you’re faced with a terrible dilemma—will you make the right choice? Can you forgive yourself if you don’t? I hope my readers recognize themselves in my characters and ask themselves what they would do if faced with the same issues.

Eve’s son, Tyler, has a rare genetic disorder that makes him fatally sensitive to light. What kind of research did you do to write about this?
Xeroderma pigmentosum (XP) is an extraordinarily rare disease passed on by both parents in which a person’s skin and eye cells cannot repair the deadly damage done by ultraviolet radiation. Most parents don’t realize they’re carriers until their child is diagnosed, usually by the time their child is 2 years old. But by then, the damage has already been done. The average life expectancy for someone born with XP is twenty years.

In order to understand the disease itself, I scoured online resources (there are two parent-run organizations, one in the US and the other in the UK that offer general information to caregivers), read numerous medical research papers, and interviewed dermatologists and dentists. Combined, this gave me a basic foundation upon which to build. Then I began to put myself in Eve’s place to imagine what I would do if I had to keep my child safe from sunlight.

While this story hinges on a deep secret and some pretty dramatic events, Eve’s basic dilemma is that she’s trying to shield her son—and to a lesser extent, her daughter—from the dangers of the world. Do you think mothers in particular feel a need to maintain control over their children’s lives?
I think the real challenge parents face today is knowing when to be present and when to step back. I don’t think the world is any more dangerous today than it was a generation ago, but the dangers are different and we’re more aware of them. A parent can become almost paralyzed by too much knowledge. And maybe it is a mother’s role to be constantly vigilant and less willing to take risks with her child’s safety.

I’d love to lock my children in a room until they’re 25, but even if that were possible, it would backfire. Kids are smart—they can fool you into thinking you know what they’re up to. The trick is to give them just enough freedom so they can make a few mistakes and learn a few life lessons that will keep them safe. There’s a lot of trust involved—on both sides.

Eve goes to almost unimaginable lengths to protect her family, yet we find ourselves empathizing with her. Why do you think she is a likable character in spite of her choices and actions?
It’s challenging to write protagonists who make difficult choices. I don’t expect my readers necessarily to agree with Eve’s decisions but I do hope they can understand why she makes them. By showing how much she loves her son and how much he loves her in return, I hope my readers can sympathize with her and ultimately root for her, even when she stumbles.

Without giving too much away, would you consider your book to have a happy ending?
Yes, absolutely. I loved writing The Deepest Secret primarily because Eve and Tyler are hopeful characters who refuse to give up, despite the odds. It’s a story about love in all its guises and in the end, it’s safe to say, love prevails—which is the happiest ending of all.

What are you working on next?
My next novel, The Good Goodbye, is the story of a friendship between two young women after they arrive at a burn unit following a devastating college fire, and that of their families and the mystery which ultimately brought them to that moment.

What inspires a female writer whose work runs the gamut from a Pulitzer Prize-winning column to best-selling novels to thought-provoking essays? Anna Quindlen says she admires a number of female writers.

“Where do I begin? With Jane Austen, I suppose, but there’s also Edith Wharton, Mary Wesley, Elizabeth Bowen, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, and Maud Hart Lovelace,” Quindlen writes in an email interview. “And some of my contemporaries consistently blow me away, like Alice McDermott and Amy Bloom. Alice Munro won the Nobel. Nuff said.”

Quindlen’s list focuses on novelists, and in fact that’s the direction she has chosen for her career, which began in reporting before she became a columnist. But life and work don’t always carry us in expected directions; Quindlen’s most recent book prior to Still Life with Bread Crumbs was Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, a collection of essays on aging.

“The strategy is meant to be that I write fiction fulltime,” she explains. “But as I investigated the new aging in our society, in my own life and those of my friends, I decided I wanted to mull it over in print. Hence Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake. It just happened.”

"When the notebook is your imagination, it’s often harder to decipher."

She’s back on track with Still Life with Bread Crumbs, which is an exploration of aging through the experiences of a photographer whose life has been lived in the public eye. Rebecca Winter’s iconic photograph “Still Life with Bread Crumbs” made her famous and brought the kind of money that allowed her to comfortably dwell in her upscale Manhattan apartment for some time, even after her husband split. But Winter’s funds are dwindling, so she sublets her apartment and moves to a cabin in rural New York.

Quindlen says she can relate to Winter’s struggle to balance art and commerce. “I think every writer feels she is one book from irrelevancy. It’s such an uncertain way to make a living: no regular paycheck or pension, no healthcare plan or regular hours. We’ve all watched great talents fall in and out of fashion, and that could happen to any of us,” Quindlen says. “That’s why it’s so important to do what Rebecca learns to do: judge yourself by yourself. At a certain point at the very end of a book, I read it over and have an interior conversation: Self, I say to myself, this is good work. It’s no substitute for being able to pay the gas bill, as Rebecca knows well, but it helps to insulate you against the fickle opinion of the world.”

Like Winter, Quindlen has houses both in New York City and the country, but she says the city is home. “New York City and I have the same metabolism. I’m like cockroaches; I’m here for the duration.” But the more meandering pace of country life is certainly reflected in the novel. Still Life utilizes shorter chapters, each with telling titles, and the story isn’t always linear.

“I decided I wanted to deconstruct the conventional novel. We absorb the notion that backstory should fit seamlessly into present action, that every aspect needs to be spun out into lengthy observation. I decided to take the sandwich apart: ham, cheese, bread. Current action, backstory, supporting materials. The chapter titles are mustard, I guess. (Now I’m hungry.),” Quindlen says. And we should expect to see echoes of this approach in the future: “I really enjoyed doing this; it’s gotten under my skin and is definitely coloring the novel I’m working on now, although it’s quite different.”

Though she draws from the same well of talents whether she's reporting or dreaming up fiction, Quindlen says fiction challenges her in very different ways than journalism. “Not having the reporting to rely upon means that I’m a good deal more adrift. More of what I do comes to me at random times: cooking dinner, powerwalking. When I’m struggling with nonfiction, I can always look in my notebooks. When the notebook is your imagination, it’s often harder to decipher.”

Even so, common threads remain through her present work and that of her past. In the aforementioned New York Times essay, Quindlen concluded, “I am a reporter of invented stories now, but no less a reporter because of that.”

Carla Jean Whitley is a writer and editor based in Birmingham, Alabama. 

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Read our review of Still Life with Bread Crumbs.

Susan Mallery is a sparkling conversationalist: She’s funny, smart and easy to talk to about all manner of topics, from her writing career to dog breeds to her favorite eyeshadow brand (it’s Laura Geller).

That accessible quality is reflected in her books: Mallery has a talent for building vivid fictional worlds, creating characters we can relate to and skillfully depicting the highs, lows and occasional weirdness of relationships—whether between friends, lovers, co-workers, family members or even owners and pets.

Her ability to connect with readers has won Mallery legions of fans around the world. She has sold more than 23 million books, with more than 50 of her novels landing a place on bestseller lists for a combined 500 weeks.

Now in the third decade of her career, she has written more than 100 novels, ranging from spicy romances featuring sheiks and cowboys to more recent women’s fiction set in beach communities with dazzling scenery and small-town intrigue.

Fans of Mallery’s best-selling Blackberry Island books will be excited about her new series, which debuts with The Girls of Mischief Bay, set in a coastal community in Los Angeles County. Three friends—30ish Nicole, 40ish Shannon and 50ish Pam—find themselves at turning points in their lives, whether they want to be there or not.

Nicole was happy with her husband Eric, young son Tyler and her Pilates business, until Eric quit his job to work on a screenplay without discussing it with her first. She struggles with resentment and uncertainty, and tries to maintain hope for the future of her marriage.

Meanwhile, Shannon is proud of her successful career in finance, but wishes she could meet a man who’d appreciate, rather than be threatened by, her work. Adam is an excellent prospect: He’s smart, determined to learn from mistakes he made in his first marriage and has two cute kids. But will conflicts about stepparenting derail them?

And then there’s Pam, who wants to shake things up a bit. She’s happily married to John, has a good relationship with her adult children, and her dog Lulu is an adorable sidekick. But she wants more . . . or different . . . or something. Just when she starts to feel re-energized, something terrible happens—and she has to figure things out all over again.

What these women are dealing with is the stuff of life, and that’s what Mallery likes about writing both women’s fiction and romance
—the kinds of relationships she can create, the topics she can tackle and the chance to do new kinds of stories.

“I’m really lucky because I get to do both. It keeps writing fresh for me, and it’s fun. I’m actually plotting the next book right now,” she says during a call to her Seattle home, where she lives with her husband and their three pets (a toy poodle and two ragdoll cats). “I’ve written three pages, am working on characters—only 547 pages to go! By the time I hit 500 I’ll be desperate to return to Fool’s Gold,” one of her wildly popular romance series, “and so ready for boy meets girl.”

Romantics need not fret; when Mallery writes a women’s fiction book, “one storyline is always straight romance. In The Girls of Mischief Bay, it was Shannon.” And while there’s certainly sex happening in the lives of the Mischief Bay characters, more is left to the imagination in this and Mallery’s other women’s fiction. Overall, though, she says with a laugh, “It’s the real miracle of my career that, even after I’ve done so many books, I still want to write about sex.”

She’s been writing about sex and love in its various guises since 1992, when her first book, Frontier Flame, was published—right after she graduated from college with an accounting degree. She’d been an avid romance reader since her teen years, and when she saw a notice for an adult education course on romance writing a few months before graduation, it called to her. “I was used to doing assignments for college, so I figured I should write a book . . . and then I realized that’s what I wanted to do.”

And do it she has: She publishes four or five books a year, does readings and blog-tour interviews and interacts with fans on Twitter and Facebook. In fact, Mallery says, social media has become integral to the detailed worldbuilding she does for each series.

Visitors to the author’s website, susanmallery.com, will find recipes from the restaurants of Mischief Bay, along with a map of the town and a list of clever business names, like Chinese restaurant Wok’s Up and the Strung Out Kite Shop.

“All the businesses in Mischief Bay have been named by Facebook fans, and some are hysterically funny,” Mallery says. “I hope it’s a fun little diversion for [readers].

“Facebook, for me, is extraordinarily fun,” she says. “We do surveys or ask questions and get a lot of feedback. . . . Even if it’s not what I want to hear, it’s really nice to know what people are thinking.”

That’s a lot of information to manage and cross-check, whether ensuring consistency in Mischief Bay’s locations and storylines, or in the other books and series Mallery has in play at any given time.

Might her accounting background help with that? “Managing that much work does require a skill set,” she says. “Being organized and breaking a project down really does make a huge difference. I simply couldn’t do the volume I do if I wasn’t able to, in essence, be a project manager.”

And of course, she says, “I enjoy creating relationships and exploring friendship and throwing in an element of life that sends characters down a path they didn’t anticipate.

“It’s interesting to me, and I do get to giggle through my day. I’m very, very lucky. I love what I do.”

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Icebreaker is a publisher-sponsored interview.

What would it be like to discover as an adult that everything you thought you knew about your family was wrong? And that you have birth relatives you've never met? That's the dilemma facing Quinn Weller, the Los Angeles chef at the heart of Jill Shalvis' intriguing new novel, Lost and Found Sisters.

Still grieving the death of her sister, Beth, two years earlier, Quinn receives the shock of her life when a lawyer informs her that she was adopted when she was two days old. Shaken and confused, she leaves her busy life in L.A. behind and heads to the small town of Wildstone, California, to find out more about her inheritance from the mother she never knew.

This compelling women's fiction title is a departure for Shalvis, who made her career as a romance writer. A true multi-tasker, the author told us more about Lost and Found Sisters while walking three dogs on a trail near her home in the Lake Tahoe area. 

Lynn: This is your first book in the women’s fiction category after almost 20 years of writing romance. It’s good to see a successful author make the move to branch out creatively like this. What was the impetus for this new direction?

Jill: I had wanted to write a bigger story for a long time, and this particular idea has stuck with me. I tried to do it as a regular romance but it was too big and it needed more point of views than would work within my mainstream romances. So I was lucky enough that HarperCollins wanted a bigger story from me. They contracted me to do both—romance and women’s fiction. The idea was all mine, they just gave me an opportunity to do it and I’m happy to go for it.

What was different about the way you approached this book, compared to writing a romance?

In a romance, which I love and will never stop writing, the romance is the core of the story. And in this book, the sisters are the core of the story. There’s still romance in it—in fact there’s two romances in it—but I think it’s the sisters that drive the story.

"I feel like my yearning [for a sister] was fulfilled, in a way, by writing this book."

You get to write about some issues and situations in Lost and Found Sisters that you probably haven't broached in your romance novels. Which ones were the most interesting for you to explore?

In addition to being women’s fiction and romance, I think this is also a New Adult story because Tilly is a young character. And that excited me the most. I have three daughters, and they're at an age that fascinates me—they’re all in their early 20s. I’ve always wanted to write a younger heroine, but I didn’t feel like it was the right thing to do in a romance. You can't give a 22-year-old a happy-ever-after and expect it to be real and lasting. That’s a little unrealistic. So when I started writing Tilly, I thought I’m finally going to get to do this voice that I have inside me that I’ve been yearning to write. I really enjoyed writing her story. And with the longer word count and the extra point of view, I was able to take things deeper in this book.

Let’s talk about sisters, which, as you said, are at the core of this novel. I have two sisters, and they’ve always been an important part of my life. I can’t imagine not having sisters. So I wondered: Do you have sisters? What was your relationship with them growing up?

I didn’t have a sister and I always, always wished for a sister. It was a deep fantasy of mine to find out that maybe I had been adopted and had this huge family I didn’t know about. But that never happened [laughter]! It was something I yearned for, and I feel like my yearning was fulfilled, in a way, by writing this book.

But you do have daughters, and I assume that after raising three girls, you’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly of sibling relationships?

Yes, I’ve seen it all. In fact, we had my three daughters and then we took one in, so I really raised four teenage girls. And I have truly seen it all and experienced it all through their eyes. That also lent some power to the voice in the book, I think, because I could see the things that are real that are going on in their lives, and fictionalize them. I love studying them and I love studying their relationships, which are very complicated, as you probably know, with sisters.

Yes, I think it’s probably one of the most complicated relationships in life. How close in age are your girls?

Very close. Let’s see, I’ve got 22, 23, 24 and 26.

I can only imagine the teenage years!

I call them the deep dark years of hell. I’m not sure how we all survived, but we did.

In addition to sisters, adoption is also at the core of this story. At one point, Quinn's good friend Brock tells her, "I'm sorry, [your parents] should've told you, but it doesn't change anything about who you are. It doesn't. You're still smart, funny and amazing." Is Brock right? How do you feel about the decision by Quinn’s parents not to tell her she was adopted?

There are two points of view—one is the writer in me, or if I were, say, a friend of Quinn’s. Both of those people think she should have been told. But the mother in me can understand why they didn’t tell her. It doesn’t make it right, but I can understand.

And would you say the same thing about her birth mother, Caroline, and the choice she made to give her daughter up for adoption?

Again, as a mother, I don’t understand the choice Caroline made, but I can appreciate that she made it, and that she wanted Quinn to have something she thought she couldn’t give her.

Let’s talk about more about Tilly, Quinn's younger sister. She’s such an interesting character and so believable as a teen who’s just lost her mother. How did you approach her part of the story?

In my original vision for this book, it was going to be told from Tilly’s point of view. But that was years ago, in my head, and the reality was that Quinn really needed to be the narrator so we could fully understand Tilly—because Tilly was too young to understand all the nuances of everything that was going on. So if I’d done it from her point of view we would have missed a lot.

Quinn's antagonist, Lena, must’ve also been a fun character to write.

Oh yeah. I love her.

You love or you hate her? Which is it?

Both! I think she’s incredible. She’s been through a rough time and she’s a survivor. I tried to make her more than just a villain so we could understand where she was coming from. I needed someone for Quinn to butt heads against, a brutally honest point of view so Quinn could hear some hard things, and that’s where Lena came from. I needed that person for Quinn.

And she worked very well in that role. And then there is Lena’s old flame, Mick. Sparks start to fly between Mick and Quinn, and you’ve included some steamy scenes between the two of them. But those scenes don’t dominate the story. Was that hard? Did you have to fight the inclination to focus more on the romantic parts of the story?

Definitely. I love Mick and I love Dylan and I really wanted to write about the two romances, but there was also the core relationship of the two sisters that was drawing me. So I was lucky that I got to write all of it.

Wildstone, the small town in California where much of the story takes place, doesn’t have street lights, billboards, drive-throughs, reliable cell service, Thai takeout or Uber. Why did you want to set the novel in a town like this one and what does it contribute to the story?

It makes Quinn an automatic fish out of water, for one thing, coming from the big city of L.A. We’ve all heard about small towns but not everyone has actually experienced one, so I was trying to make that setting come to life—and poke a little fun at it, the culture of it. There’s a place in the middle of the state of California where we go—there are a couple of beaches in the area, it’s outlined by ranches and green rolling hills, and it’s one of my favorite places. So I kind of “stole” it, let’s say, for Wildstone.

You also had some personal inspiration for Quinn’s experience, I assume, because you live in a small town now but you grew up mostly in L.A.

Yes, and growing up, I was that girl who couldn’t imagine a small town and who poked fun at it if I went to one. I’d never tried to live in a small town until about 15 years ago. We moved to a small town near Lake Tahoe and it was quite the transition. I still have that big city girl in me, but now I’m happy to visit the city and go home.

Your books have always included a lot of comedy, and this one does as well even though it deals with serious subjects. Why is that important to you?

Life can be really hard if you let it. Certainly I’ve had a lot of complications and trials and tribulations like everyone else, and it’s my way of coping, to try to find the funny in everything. I’ve found that really works in fiction, too. If I’m talking about something really serious and there’s something funny going on in the background, that makes it OK.

Do you think your romance fans will follow you to this new book? Or do you expect to attract a new group of fans?

All of it! I hope my romance readers follow me. I think I gave them enough romance in this book to make them happy. And I also hope to reach new readers—people who haven’t given romance a shot before and people who love women’s fiction.