67. The Peach Rebellion

The Peach Rebellion. Wendelin Van Draanen. 2022. 416 pages. [Source: Library]

First sentence from the prologue: It's August sixteenth. My birthday. I wake up before sunup, excited.

Premise/plot: The Peach Rebellion is historical fiction with dual narration. Our two heroines are Peggy Simmons and Ginny Rose Gilley. These two were friends as children, but life has pulled them in different directions, until now. Now eleven years later, these two friends are reuniting. But they've grown and changed in oh so many ways. The Gilley family migrated to California from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl. Life has been HARD, tremendously hard. The Simmons family isn't rich by any means, but they are rich by comparison. They have their own farm--growing and selling peaches. Neither family is super-excited that the girls are becoming friends again. Another person who shows some dissatisfaction with this new (old) friendship is Lisette Bovee, the banker's daughter. 

The historical setting is California in the summer of 1947.

My thoughts: I wanted to (but didn't) love this one. There were things that I liked about it. I think I liked the characters at their core. I liked Peggy and Ginny Rose. I even grew to tolerate Lisette. (Mostly I wanted to yell at Lisette.) But I definitely did not like the story or the direction the story goes. A different story with these characters I could easily see myself enjoying more. I liked the coming-of-age elements of this one. And how each of the girls is handling the new responsibilities that come with growing up. Including an interest in boys. There is a we're-in-this-together element that I definitely enjoyed.

So what didn't I like about the story itself? I thought it was MORBID. Morbid and weird. The major plot of this one involves, well, something a bit unusual...and dark. In my opinion. Reading is subjective. Maybe other readers won't find it so unpleasant?

S
P
O
I
L
E
R

A
L
E
R
T

Read at your own risk, spoilers ahead.

So in the prologue (when the main characters are around seven), Ginny Rose goes with her father to bury her younger (twins???) brothers who died of disease in one of the migrant camps. (Remember this was during the Dust Bowl, the big migration to California, and during the Great Depression as well.) That's not the morbid part, not really. Now as a teen (seventeen? eighteen?) Ginny Rose is determined (with the help of her friends) to go on a journey to discover the unmarked grave of her brothers and bring home their bodies. Maybe it is 100% me. Maybe teens wouldn't mind at all trekking across the country in a "borrowed" family truck with a couple of shovels on a mission to dig up dead bodies. But for me, well, it isn't so much the desire to give closure to the family by giving them a proper burial and an actual marked grave that is disturbing, but the hands-on and SURPRISE element of it. They are going to sneak out on their own and SURPRISE their family with the bodies in the back of the truck. And that just doesn't sound like something you should just surprise someone with. Or maybe again that's just me???

© 2022 Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews