Second novels are known to be tough, something Vanessa Diffenbaugh can vouch for.

"It was definitely a struggle to write this one," Diffenbaugh says about We Never Asked for Wings (Ballantine Books, Aug.), the follow-up to her smash debut, The Language of Flowers. "The hardest part was that I listened too much to my critics and wanted to fix things that weren't right. I wasted a lot of time until I remembered what I was good at. Once I stopped trying to write something better or different than my first book, it was a lot easier."

We Never Asked for Wings might have been written sooner, but Diffenbaugh spent almost two years of travel around the world promoting The Language of Flowers. That novel spent 69 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was translated into a 43 languages.

We Never Asked for Wings, like Language, is a family love story. It centers on a Mexican-American family headed by Letty, a mother struggling to make ends meet for her two children in a crumbling housing development outside of San Francisco. Diffenbaugh, through the work of her husband, superintendent of schools in Monterey, Calif., hosts programs that helps teens write college essays. One of the children she helped was the inspiration for the story.

"I'm very interested in getting inside the heads of people society discards, people on the fringe, especially immigrant kids. We dismiss them without getting into details of who they are. I love getting into the details with fiction," Diffenbaugh says. She would like her readers to get into the heads of these people, too, "from a heart perspective, not from a policy or politics experience."

Does she have any favorite characters in the book? "I have so many, which is funny, because there were so many days when I hated all of them. The mother, the boy—one of my very favorite is the boy's friend, Yesenia, who has physical problems, one leg is shorter than the other. I met someone just like that, in San Luis Obispo. And I thought, this story needs to be told."

Diffenbaugh signs galleys today at 11 a.m. at Table 3 in the autographing area. She will join Annie Barrows and Paula McLain on the panel "The Book Club Insider: Three Bestselling Authors on the Power of Reading Together" at BookCon on Saturday, 11 a.m.–noon, at the Penguin Random House booth stage area (near 3119). 

This article appeared in the May 28, 2015 edition of PW BEA Show Daily.