“Each year, as the sweet smell of peaches filled the June air and ripened into summer, I found myself looking for Ginny Rose Gilley.”
*Spoiler to come. I’m warning you!*
Wendelin Van Draanen’s The Peach Rebellion (Random House Children’s Books 2022) is a delightful middle grade novel set in California in 1947. Ginny Rose Gilley is an “Okie” – or as she likes to call it, a survivor. She remembers the farm the family had before it was taken by the bank. She remembers the old shacks they called homes. She remembers when her younger brothers died on her birthday. And she remembers helping her father bury them in a ditch. She also remembers summers spent on the Simmons peach orchard, playing with Peggy Simmons and picking peaches. When her father finds himself a stable job, she finds herself back in town. It’s been years, but Peggy hasn’t forgotten her.
Peggy lived for those summers with Ginny Rose. Ginny Rose made the work seem less dull. Without Ginny, she has continued to hustle, preparing the harvest and even manning a roadside stand to help the family business. Her best friend, Lisette, is the daughter of a banker. Peggy would give anything to be able to pay her way into places like Lisette, to earn real money, instead she pays her way with peaches and quietly takes Lisette’s offered hand-me-downs. Peggy’s got her eyes set on Rodney St. Clair. What she doesn’t know is that so does Lisette.
Peggy would love for her two friends to become friends, but Ginny Rose wants nothing to do with the daughter of a banker. And Lisette doesn’t really want to be friends with an “Okie.” But the summer of 1947 will see all three of their lives shaken up just a bit, and they realize what they can accomplish if they trust each other together.
SPOILER **************************SPOILER************************SPOILER**********
Beyond the surface level romance, the main plot of the novel is Ginny Rose trying to get the bodies of her brothers back so they can be buried at a church. Her mother’s depression is getting worse, and Ginny Rose thinks if she has somewhere to visit the boys, somewhere to call home, it might improve. She gets Peggy to help her try to find the unmarked grave and dig them up, and even Lisette agrees. Some folks have called this morbid, but that doesn’t bother me. The one issue I really have with it is how she suddenly decides this is what her mother needs, and when they get there, she sees they’re doing construction over where they were buried so they can’t back out. I’d have preferred it if she went to try and find their grave or heard of the construction, and then decided to bring them home.
It’s a sweet and sticky novel of summertime and the forging of friendships that will last forever.
Read this novel.
A Girl Named Tommi 