Anderson, Jodi Lynn (2005). Peaches. NY: Harper Collins. ISBN: 0060733063. 320 pages.
Summary and Evaluation: One spring and summer, three disparate teenage girls are called upon to work at a Georgia peach orchard: Birdie, the shy, homeschooled, daughter of the orchard's owner, has worked there all her life; Murphy, a lower caste school bad girl, is "sentenced" to work the farm; and Leeda, the daughter of one of the town's richest families and Birdie's cousin, is sent to the orchard to get out of the way of her sister's wedding preparations. Though the girls are acquainted with one another, they have never been friends or allies. Of course, all that changes when they start working together at the orchard. Ho, hum. This novel was described as a "first cousin" to Ann Brashares' The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants; however, if the two books are related, I'm willing to bet that the marriage that spawned Peaches was illegal. The novel is OK; however, I never really get an intimate sense of the characters. Where Brashares' Sisterhood characters were broadly drawn types, I at least felt I got to know them; here, neither the typology or the characterization has a whole lot of meat. The characters each have a personal "issue" to deal with but, as in life, these issues aren't really resolved. While this could be an argument for the novel's well-constructed mimesis, it really ends up an argument that would described the half-finished feeling I got when I read the last page. |
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