The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh is delightful and crushing. It’s a beautiful tale of love, forgiveness and redemption.  Victoria is a young woman who has aged out of foster care after spending her entire childhood bouncing from foster homes to group homes. While she is horrible at making connections with others, she comes alive in dealing with any flora. In her most important family placement, Victoria learns about the language of flowers and that language is more honest and tangible than any verbal communication she has ever known. She clings to the language of flowers and her passion for gardening all while trying to grow new relationships and weed out past mistakes.

The character of Victoria is hauntingly flawed but we sympathize with her inability to make friends and I found myself touched by her emotional honesty and celebrated her every small victory. In this novel, the language of flowers turns Victoria from a thistle and basil patch (misanthropy and hate) to a fennel and hyacinth bouquet (strength and forgiveness).

I loved this book with its flawed but gentle characters and the breath-taking descriptions of various plants and flowers and their meanings. The author even included an index of the meanings of many of the most well-known flowers and I admit, I spent an hour perusing that index and making mental notes of several of my favorites.

I highly recommend this novel and will certainly keep my eyes open for anything else from Vanessa Diffenbaugh. In the language of flowers, I would give her a white Dianthus, meaning, talented.

This spring the woman’s Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state. (Definitely famous, not infamous.) Her new memoir, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948, is part self-exploration, part history lesson and a none too subtle reminder that the greatest mysteries of our lives may be right under our noses. I love that this is how she describes the events that prompted her to write the book: “Here at age 59, I thought I knew everything about myself. But I obviously hadn’t.”

In 1996, when Albright was being vetted for her position in the Clinton Administration, she and her siblings discovered not only that many of their ancestors were of Jewish origin, but that their parents had converted to Catholicism and had Madeleine baptized when she was a child–and died without breathing a word about it to any of their children.

So in a very real way Prague Winter reads like a mystery novel. Albright did know quite a lot about her parents’ lives already. Her father had worked with the Czechoslavakian government in exile during World War II, then worked as a history professor in the US; but when she discovered how much her parents hadn’t told her, she set out to reconstruct their lives from what little they had left behind.

Albright’s love of history and firsthand knowledge of how international diplomacy does (and does not) work make the chapters that detail the rise of the Third Reich feel like a college seminar taught by a master professor. (Which makes sense, since she was one.) The material can get dense. But whenever I found myself wondering “Why is she telling us this?” I bumped up against a fact I never knew–and saw how it might have affected Albright’s parents’ behavior at the time.

I also gained an admiration for the people whose heritage I share. Probably because history is written by the victors, I had no idea that there was a Czechoslavakian Resistance movement during the Nazi occupation, let alone one that was arguably more effective than its more famous sister movement in France. From London, the Czech government in exile orchestrated the only successful assassination of a Nazi official during the war. The repercussions were severe–but the success bolstered the Allies’ morale at a time it was sorely needed.

However, the heart of the memoir is Albright’s personal story. She asks the questions many of us might ask if we found ourselves in the same situation. “Why did my parents make this choice? Certainly, they had not been attempting to deceive their friends and acquaintances to whom their Jewish ancestry was no secret. Surprised, and with no parents to ask, I could only speculate from the distance of more than half a century.”

Albright imagines their decisions with sensitivity, well aware that the rise of fascism forced people into making choices most of us in peacetime are thankfully never confronted with. At the time Albright’s parents left Czechoslavakia, people of Jewish descent were beginning to be persecuted, but their flight was prompted more by her father’s political associations than the family’s ethnic background. By the time the danger became apparent, Albright’s father tried to get safe passage for the relatives who remained, but only his niece Dasa was saved by a program run by a British stockbroker.

Albright’s relationship with Dasa offers a glimpse of what trauma the choices families were faced with under Nazi rule could produce. Dasa grew up in the same house as Albright, but Madeleine “didn’t know anything about her being Jewish.”  Much later, Dasa admits that she had never forgiven her parents for not sending her sister to safety with her. Because of course ultimately, that decision sealed her fate. The family was sent to the prison camp in Terezin (also known as Theresienstad). None of them survived. It’s not difficult to imagine how or why the daughter that was the sole survivor retreated into silence.

Albright’s feelings about her parents’ choice to remain silent about their conversion speak to Dasa’s silence as well. She writes: “Although wary of addressing such a hypothetical question, I feel it is important to add my belief–given all I know about their values–that my parents would not have made the choice they did had they waited four more years. The world in 1945 differed from that of 1941, as it has ever since. Nazi persecution of Jews was well under way at the time of our baptism, but the grim unfolding of the Holocaust was still in its earliest stages . . . Perhaps this is why my parents never found a good time to discuss the decision with me and seemed to avoid doing so with others. Before the slaughter of six million Jews, they might have found the words; after it, they could not.”

Prague Winter is much more than a great read–though it is definitely that, too. It should go without saying that most of our parents are probably not hiding information as tragic as Madeleine Albright’s parents were. But her memoir made me eager to talk to my parents about their lives while I was lucky enough to have them in mine.

I love books. When I was a young woman, I wanted a house full of shelves filled with splendid books. Mama shopped the garage sales and estate sales on the weekends then, as she still sometimes does now, and she used to drag me with her. Once — only once — I hit the jackpot. At the estate sale of a majestic old home, I found a box full of gorgeous hardbound books covered in leather or cloth and labeled inside. The labels were glued inside the front covers, each volume numbered and dated by hand, once atop the shelves of the F. F. Duell Library.  I’ve no idea who Duell might have been but I know F. F. Duell once existed because I hold a piece of that life in my hand. It’s an old book, purchased on November 15, 1913, for fifty cents, according to the meticulous label. It’s titled The Early Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’m not the first owner, nor, most likely, the second. The copyright is 1900, so the book was thirteen years old before Duell picked it up. It has a red cloth cover and brittle, browning deckle-edge pages. The book is in poor shape and is probably worth nothing except to me.

I’d never paid much attention to Emerson before pulling that book out of the box. He struck me as vaguely important, probably because of my childhood Louisa May Alcott fixation. The frontispiece is a black and white photo of an old man in formal dress with white hair and a rather large nose. Then I began to read. Things like “Uriel”, “Bacchus”, and “The Sphynx”. My favorite by far is so short I can share it in full:

I fell in love with Emerson upon reading this poem. It’s perfect still to my mind. Especially at seventeen, I identified with the verse. Emerson loves someone. He doubts his beloved. He’s neurotic. He begins a sentence with “and”, a particular fault of mine according to my high school English teacher. Emerson was my first literary love.

So how could I possibly resist The Annotated Emerson?

The poetry is but a small part of this lovely volume. It contains those I’ve mentioned except “The Amulet”. The best bits and pieces of Emerson’s writing, collected by David Mikics into one lengthy, heavy, grand volume. There are essays on John Brown and Thoreau, a letter Emerson once wrote to President Martin Van Buren in defense of the Cherokee nation, and an address on emancipation in 1844. Emerson thought, wrote, spoke, and demonstrated his beliefs. The annotations are glorious. They range from noting that “empyrean” means heavens or sky, to illuminating, insightful comparisons of phrases in different pieces, accentuating strands of thought that course through Emerson’s belief system and his body of work.

Annotated collections aren’t on everyone’s list of must-read books. If you like Emerson at all, have an interest in his life’s work and the history of the time, or just love having a handsome, detailed, engrossing book to dip in and out of, this is a great volume to own. I had to have it.

When Logan starts looking into Echevarria’s death, at the request of his ex-wife’s father, his life as an assassin once again comes to the forefront. As Logan tenaciously searches for Echevarria’s killer, it becomes clear that many people don’t want him to know the truth. The cast of characters in this twisted murder mystery will leave you drooling for the next installment.

Filled with interesting characters, humorous prose, and bitingly genuine dialogue, Freed has a winner in this intrepid tale of murder and deceit. Freed’s personal knowledge of his subjects, aviation, counterterrorism, and military operations are clearly evident. When Logan takes to the cockpit, it feels as if the reader is there, too.

I can’t wait for the next book in this Cordell Logan series.

Based in sunny Rancho Bonita – “California’s Monaco” as the city’s moneyed minions like to call it – Cordell Logan is a literate, sardonic flight instructor and aspiring Buddhist with dwindling savings and a shadowy past. When his beautiful ex-wife, Savannah, shows up out of the blue to tell him that her husband has been murdered in Los Angeles, Logan is quietly pleased. Savannah’s late husband is, after all, Arlo Echevarria, the man she left Logan for.

Logan and Echevarria were once comrades-in-arms assigned to a top-secret military assassination team known simply as “Alpha.” Though Savannah was never privy to the gritty details of their assignment, she suspects that Echevarria’s death must be related to the work he did for the government. The only problem is, the LAPD can find no record of Echevarria ever having toiled for Uncle Sam. Savannah wants Logan to tell the police what he knows. At first he refuses, but then, relying on his small, aging airplane, the Ruptured Duck, and on the skills he honed working for the government, Logan doggedly hunts Echevarria’s killer.

His trail takes him from the glitzy Las Vegas Strip to the most dangerous ghettos of inner-city Oakland, from darkened, Russian mafia haunts in West Los Angeles to the deserts of Arizona. Along the way, Logan is stalked by a mysterious motorist who repeatedly tries to kill him. But that’s the least of his problems. It is his love-hate relationship with Savannah, a woman Logan continues to pine for in spite of himself, that threatens to consume him.

Transcending the worlds of murder, aviation and international counterterrorism, Flat Spin resonates with a veracity that only an author who knows his subject firsthand can deliver.

And this year, just in time for Mother’s Day, StoryCorps presents Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from StoryCorps, edited by David Isay. This collection of interviews features stories about and from mothers, falling into three categories: Wisdom, Devotion and Enduring Love. I started reading it as I sat on the bleachers waiting for my daughter at gymnastics, and the tears started to flow.

These heartfelt and touching stories are sure to strike a chord with everyone; these are stories of unconditional love and support, of commitment, forgiveness, and endurance. The speakers of these stories encompass a wide range of ages, ethnicities, social classes and relationships–and what they show is that the bond we have with our mothers is one that transcends all of these things. We’re bound by love.

Find the book at your favorite bookseller or the StoryCorps website.