River rocks and vanishing oranges

River Rocks and Vanishing Oranges is a novel set in Southern California, an area that in the first half of the 1900\u27s was the center of the citrus industry for the U.S. The growing, picking and packing of oranges was the primary industry in what today is the Inland Empire. The orange industry flourished in Highland and Redlands until the mid-1960\u27s when the area began its transformation from rural agricultural community to an urban society. The author liked the idea of writing a contemporary story that had this history as its background. She wasn\u27t interested in writing a historical fiction about the citrus industry, but rather about the people who live in the modern end result of that time period. She wanted to show the evolution of the area and of people who lived in these towns filled with acres of orange groves