8 March 2022 THE PEACH REBELLION by Wendelin Van Draanen, Random House/Knopf, May 2022, 416p., ISBN: 978-0-593-37856-4
“Liberty, laughing and shaking your head
Can you carry the torch that'll bring home the dead?”
– Graham Nash, “Southbound Train” (1972)
In 1947, two childhood best friends reconnect as teenagers, leading to a multiplicity of actions and reactions in a California Central Valley agricultural community.
Shades of Tom Joad: Ginny Rose Gilly is a so-called Okie. Her father used to farm 80 acres of wheat. But the drought that precipitated the historic Dust Bowl led to crop failures, bank foreclosures, and the necessity for the Gilly family to load up the old farm truck with whatever would fit, and head to California. They’ve been trying, ever since, to survive by eking out a living as migrant farm workers. This sequence of events in Ginny Rose’s young life also led to the deaths of Ginny’s two younger brothers.
Peggy Simmons is the daughter of a Central Valley peach farmer. She and Ginny Rose were best friends in their pre-pubescent years, two little girls hanging out together, doing farm work, sorting peaches. But then Ginny Rose’s family didn’t show up at the Simmons’s orchard for years. Peggy eventually became best friends with Lisette.
Lisette Bovee is the privileged, only child of the town banker.
THE PEACH REBELLION blew me away. The varied family dynamics in which each of these young women is entangled, and the evolving relationships that develop between Ginny Rose, Peggy, and Lisette, fuel this powerful historical novel about post-WWII California. Its depiction of women’s roles at the dawn of the Boomer era hint at the changes that, decades in the future, would eventually culminate in Title IX; female governors, senators, and Supreme Court justices; and Kamala Harris sitting a heartbeat away from the Presidency.
But that’s not how it was in 1947:
“Primogeniture is the right, by law or custom, of the firstborn legitimate child to inherit the parent’s entire or main estate in preference to shared inheritance among all or some children, any illegitimate child, or any collateral relative. In most contexts it means the inheritance of the firstborn son”
– Wikipedia
Peggy:
“She sat up a little straighter and said, ‘So Mother didn’t also tell you why I left?’
‘Why you…?’ I could see in her eyes that I was missing something but I didn’t know what.
She leaned forward, her face hardening. ‘Why I eloped…?’
I had no idea what she was getting at, so I simply said what I believed. ‘Because you fell madly in love with Tom and were sick of living at home?’
She hacked out a laugh, one full of bitterness. ‘Tom happened because I was angry.’
I bit my tongue. She’d always been some shade of angry.
In response to my silence, she asked, ‘So…do you want to know why?’
I didn’t want to know. But since it would be rude to say that, and since the kettle was coming to a boil, I said, ‘If you’re sure you want to tell me,’ and got busy making a pot of tea.
‘Well, you’re almost seventeen, so you better start facing facts.’
I turned to look at her. ‘What does this have to do with me?’
‘You know we’re just free labor to them, right?’
I gave her a hard squint. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘They’re leaving it all to Bobby. The orchard. The land. The house. Everything.’
As I sat two cups and the steaming teapot on the table, my legs turned to jelly and I landed in the chair across from her again.
‘Ha!’ she said, taking in my expression. ‘I knew they wouldn’t tell you.’”
Ginny Rose’s sudden reappearance in Ginny’s life, after a half-dozen years apart, contributes to Ginny’s and Lisette’s enlightenment, and leads to them speaking up in ways they never have before. The story also personifies and foretells the degree to which rigid class structure in the United States would begin dissolving during the booming postwar era.
This book is one not to miss. It is perfect for middle school readers as well as high schoolers.
Richie Partington, MLIS
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