The Language of Flowers is a bit like a perfectly manicured flowerbed: the symmetry and colors are breathtaking, but the work shows. In Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s debut novel, recently emancipated foster child Victoria strikes out on her own with almost no skills, interpersonal or otherwise, except for a deep connection to the Victorian language of flowers 
Our obsession with youth reaches its ultimate climax in Drew Magary’s new novel, The Postmortal. An accidental scientific discovery reveals a way to render people ageless: Once injected with a serum, patients cease to grow older than their age at that moment. Suddenly, people worldwide remain in their twenties and thirties forever, rendering death from 
Imagine, if you will, a Mary Gaitskill story collection in which the author casts a fond eye on the foibles and bad behavior of her characters. That book is Elissa Schappell’s Blueprints for Building Better Girls, a collection of eight sharp, meticulously etched and tenuously linked tales of female archetypes 
When was the last time your heart started pounding as you read a novel? Or learned something you didn’t know about Manhattan’s history? If you can’t remember, run, don’t walk, to purchase a copy of Beverly Swerling’s compulsively readable City of Promise 
