Lauri Jo Daniels and Emily Ellet portray two strong teens who are living in California’s Central Valley during the 1940s. Daniels colors the chapters narrated by 16-year-old Ginny Rose with a mild Oklahoma accent. Daniels also captures the tenderness Ginny Rose has for her sisters and her best friend, Peggy. Ginny Rose’s family lost their Oklahoma farm in the Dust Bowl, and at age 6, with both dysentery and dust raging, she helped her father bury her two young brothers, and she’s been supporting the family ever since. Ellet narrates Peggy’s chapters, reflecting her higher class, privilege, and sensitivity to Ginny Rose’s difficulties. Peggy faces her own troubles when she learns how her family’s patriarchal structure has been undercutting her power. Prejudices surrounding class, economics, and gender are strong themes. S.W. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
The Peach Rebellion
Narrated by Lauri Jo Daniels, Emily Ellet
Wendelin Van DraanenUnabridged — 11 hours, 53 minutes
The Peach Rebellion
Narrated by Lauri Jo Daniels, Emily Ellet
Wendelin Van DraanenUnabridged — 11 hours, 53 minutes
Overview
Ginny Rose and Peggy were best friends at seven, picking peaches on hot summer days. Peggy's family owned the farm, and Ginny Rose's were pickers, escaping the Oklahoma dust storms. That didn't matter to them then, but now, ten years, hard miles, and a world war later, Ginny Rose's family is back in town and their differences feel somehow starker. Especially since Peggy's new best friend, Lisette, is a wealthy banker's daughter.
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Still, there's no denying what all three girls have in common: Families with great fissures that are about to break wide open. And a determination to not just accept things as they are anymore.
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This summer they will each make a stand. It's a season of secrets revealed. Of daring plans to heal old wounds. Of hearts won and hearts broken. A summer when everything changes because you're seventeen, and it's time to be bold. And because it's easier to be brave with a true friend by your side.
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Editorial Reviews
04/18/2022
In a historical novel set in 1947 California, Van Draanen (Hope in the Mail) chronicles the friendship of two presumed white teens whose friendship is constrained by societal attitudes. Ten years before this book’s present, 16-year-old Ginny Rose’s little brothers died of dysentery in a shantytown after the family lost everything in Oklahoma. Now, her father’s permanent job at the Ferrybank train yard means a settled home for the family, which previously took on work as migrant farmers. Her childhood friend, Peggy—whose family owns a peach farm where Ginny’s dad once worked—is happy that Ginny’s back, though both families disapprove of their friendship’s disregard for class boundaries. While Ginny Rose navigates a grueling new job and protects her sisters from their grieving mother’s increasingly unpredictable moods, Peggy learns uncomfortable truths about those closest to her. Soon, the teens commit to a risky plan to bring closure to Ginny’s family’s painful past, and their bond offers them both a new feeling of freedom. Exploring gender roles and class hierarchies alongside postwar U.S. attitudes that resonate today, Van Draanen’s heartfelt telling captures the close bond of two lovable heroines. Ages 12–up. Agent: Ginger Knowlton, Curtis Brown. (May)
"Van Draanen continues to capture the souls of teenage girls, perfectly penning the hopes and fears of her protagonists. A compelling story of friendship and learning from tragedy." —SLJ
"Van Draanen’s heartfelt telling captures the close bond of two lovable heroines." —Publishers Weekly
“Readers will cheer, then weep, as the unlikely trio of Ginny Rose, Peggy, and Lisette sets out to heal a broken family. The time and place are beautifully evoked, but it’s the characters who power this story.”
—Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, Newbery Honor Winner for The War that Saved My Life and Fighting Words
“In this story, grit creates not a pearl but the indomitable Ginny Rose, a Dust Bowl Anne of Green Gables. I couldn’t pull myself away.”
—Kirby Larson, author of Code Word Courage and Newbery Honor Winner for Hattie Big Sky
“A beautifully written historical novel about compassion, marginalization and inclusion and, above all, empathy and friendship. Sure to delight and inspire.”
—Francisco Jiménez, award winning author of The Circuit, Breaking Through, Reaching Out and Taking Hold
“The Peach Rebellion gets everything right. A compelling story of three fully realized girls who navigate friendships across boundaries and find common ground together. Not to be missed!”
—Deborah Hopkinson, author of How I Became a Spy, We Had to be Brave, and Sibert Honor winner for Titanic: Voices from the Disaster
“The Peach Rebellion is a warm, heart-felt hug of a story. Ginny Rose and Peggy captured my heart from the first pages as they wrestled with friendship, family, fixing old wrongs, and finding their place in 1940s California.”
—Rosalyn Eves, author of Beyond the Mapped Stars and the Blood Rose Rebellion trilogy
"Highlights bonds between unforgettable female characters." —Kirkus Reviews
08/26/2022
Gr 8 Up—Van Draanen's foray into historical fiction is a successful snapshot of post-Depression America. Even more importantly, she continues to capture the souls of teenage girls, perfectly penning the hopes and fears of her protagonists' progression. The two narrators—Ginny Rose and Peggy—are distinct. Ginny Rose grapples with settling down after years of Dust Bowl travels and heartbreak, experiences reflected in her steely outlook and resolve. She works to provide for her family, both physically and emotionally. Peggy also experiences growth, minus the tragic backstory. She inhabits the optimism of a kid growing up through wartime, seeing life and gender roles change and now finding herself unwilling to move backward. The friendship between these girls, and the relationships of the siblings and acquaintances around them, are all built on compassion. There are no simple villains here. Everyone has a story, everyone is complex, and the post-Depression era setting serves to educate while highlighting fundamental lessons about empathy. All main characters cue white. VERDICT A compelling story of friendship and learning from tragedy, set against a historically accurate and fascinating backdrop.—Cat McCarrey
Lauri Jo Daniels and Emily Ellet portray two strong teens who are living in California’s Central Valley during the 1940s. Daniels colors the chapters narrated by 16-year-old Ginny Rose with a mild Oklahoma accent. Daniels also captures the tenderness Ginny Rose has for her sisters and her best friend, Peggy. Ginny Rose’s family lost their Oklahoma farm in the Dust Bowl, and at age 6, with both dysentery and dust raging, she helped her father bury her two young brothers, and she’s been supporting the family ever since. Ellet narrates Peggy’s chapters, reflecting her higher class, privilege, and sensitivity to Ginny Rose’s difficulties. Peggy faces her own troubles when she learns how her family’s patriarchal structure has been undercutting her power. Prejudices surrounding class, economics, and gender are strong themes. S.W. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
2022-03-29
Ginny Rose Gilley’s family struggled to survive as migrant farm workers after losing their Oklahoma farm to the Dust Bowl.
On her birthday, Ginny Rose had to do something no newly 6-year-old should ever have to do: help her father bury her two younger brothers who died of dysentery. Now it’s 1947, and her father is working at a railway station, 16-year-old Ginny Rose has a job at a cannery, and the family is finally putting down roots in a town in California’s Central Valley they know well from their migrant farming days. However, their improving circumstances do little to ease her mother’s all-consuming grief that makes life difficult for Ginny Rose and her three younger sisters. Working gives Ginny Rose new freedom, and a rekindled childhood friendship with peach farmer’s daughter Peggy Simmons allows her to be a carefree teenager for the first time. Peggy’s wealthy best friend threatens to get in the way of the friendship, but an out-of-the-ordinary adventure unexpectedly brings the girls together. Themes of class and wealth are handled with a light but impactful touch, and the presumed White main characters resist the gender and economic inequalities they face with courage and grit. Unfortunately, racial themes are less well developed: Mexican fieldworkers’ lives are presented without nuance, and Japanese American farming families, a significant population in this region until their recent wartime incarceration, are not mentioned at all.
Highlights bonds between unforgettable female characters. (Historical fiction. 13-18)
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940176006414 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 05/17/2022 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
1
Peggy
Reunion
Each year, as the sweet smell of peaches filled the June air and ripened into summer, I found myself looking for Ginny Rose Gilley. For seven summers, I held on to a fading hope that she’d show up at our orchard, just like she had the summers I’d turned seven, eight, and nine.
The first summer she didn’t come I was devastated.
Where was she? How was I going to survive harvest without her?
Growing peaches may sound romantic, but when your family owns twenty acres of them, reality is quick to replace fantasy, and when picking season is in full swing, farms all over need help with harvest, including ours. Especially ours. There’s no shaking a peach tree to get the fruit down, or using a machine to harvest it. Peaches need hand picking, and every summer field workers swarm in to help.
The summer I turned ten, pickers came, but Ginny Rose and her father did not. That left me spending long, hot days sorting peaches in the field with strangers, and my family certainly didn’t fill the void. Bobby, who was twelve and full of himself, and Doris, who was thirteen and full of spite, bossed me around, while Father ran the crew and Mother gave birth to twins.
“They’re boys,” I heard Father say when Willie and Wesley were born, his breath gusting out on a big sigh of relief, as though he could see himself resting at some future date.
Mother, on the other hand, seemed condemned to never rest again. Those babies cried. And fussed. And cried some more. “Boys,” I heard her mutter, and in it was a whole wide world of weary.
My mother had been my only ally. Oh, my grandmother Nonnie, who lived with us, used to be, but the older she got—or maybe the older I got—the more she seemed to disapprove of me. And now they were both overoccupied with the twins and had little patience for my misery.
“They’ve surely moved on,” Mother said that first summer, when I complained about missing Ginny Rose. “Maybe they’ve gone back to Oklahoma. You should hope for them that they’ve found something better than fieldwork,” she said, changing Willie’s diaper.
“But Ginny Rose is my friend,” I whimpered. “My best friend!”
“You have plenty of friends, Peggy,” Nonnie said, changing Wesley’s.
“Not like her!” I wailed.
Nonnie raised an eyebrow in Mother’s direction, indicating her disapproval at my tone. Nonnie is Father’s mother, and that eyebrow of hers has done my mother in on more than one occasion.
“Well,” Mother said to me, ignoring the eyebrow as she finished pinning the diaper tight, “friendship won’t feed their family, and that’s the same for us. Now go out there and do your part.”
I did do my part. From dawn to dinner, I sorted peaches brought down by the field hands, hauled buckets of drinking water out to the orchard, and helped load wooden lug boxes of fruit high on a truck bound for the cannery. I did my part until peach fuzz coated my arms and face, until it permeated every pocket, every seam, every fiber of my being. I did my part until the trees were bare and the sickening rot of fruit on the ground buzzed with flies. I did my part until I never wanted to taste or touch or smell another peach for as long as I lived.
Anyone who’s lived this life knows—farming’s a roll of the dice, a prayer to the skies, and work. Endless, body-bruising work. And every nickel we earned seemed to be needed for repairs, supplies, and equipment.
But even farmwork can be fun when you’ve got a friend. Nonnie was right—I did have other friends—but Ginny Rose was special. Maybe that was because we did the same work—fieldwork. Words can’t really explain what it’s like, so mostly I didn’t feel like talking about “my summer vacation” to other friends, or at school. Our family rarely went anywhere. And during harvest? We never took a day off, not even Sundays.
Summer meant working the farm.
Dawn to dark, we worked the farm.
So there was that, but there was also the way Ginny Rose could make me laugh. We’d giggle about everything, including Bobby, who was as bossy then as he is now, and Doris, who’d rather sting us with insults than work alongside us. Having Ginny Rose around made the days go by fast.
So even as I got older, even as I moved from working out back in the orchard to working out front at our fruit stand, I missed her. I missed us. But this summer after the month of June came and went, I finally stopped hoping she’d reappear. I’d be seventeen soon. It was time to let her go.
Besides, so many things had changed since those summers with her. The war had started and ended, rations were over, Franklin Delano Roosevelt—who’d been president for as far back as I could remember—had died, and Harry Truman was now in charge.
And the biggest change of all?
Everyone seemed more hopeful.
Also, if I’m being completely honest, instead of pinning my hopes on a friend who’d disappeared, I was putting them on Rodney St. Clair, a classmate who had already appeared at the fruit stand four times since school let out in June and had been especially friendly to me when I’d seen him at the Freedom Parade on the Fourth of July.
So that was where my mind was—firmly and fondly focused on sweet thoughts of Rodney St. Clair.
And then, suddenly, there she was.
“Ginny Rose?” I gasped. She was standing in front of the fruit stand, blue-eyed and freckled, her strawberry-blond hair braided in one long tail, just the way I remembered.
“Peggy!” she squealed. “That is you!”
We threw our arms right over the stand, right over the peaches, right over the years that had divided us, and wrapped each other tight.
I held on to her shoulders as we pulled apart. “Where have you been? Do you know how much I’ve missed you?”
“Aw!” she said, her eyes going glassy. “Honest?”
“What do you mean? Yes, of course! You were my best friend.”
“Aw!” she said again, this time looking away as she blinked back tears.
“So what happened?” I pressed. “Where have you been?”
She shrugged noncommittally. “We moved around a lot. You know that.”
“But . . . where? Mother said you might have gone back to Oklahoma.”
Ginny Rose shook her head. “Papa lost everything there, so . . . no.”
“But . . . are you still . . . are you still farmhands?”
“No. Papa found other work during the war, but he still hopped from job to job. We never really put down roots anywhere.” She brightened. “But he’s got a permanent job at the Ferrybank switching yard now.”
“At the rail station?”
She nodded. “The job comes with housing and a little piece of land. We’re plannin’ to stay.”
“That’s wonderful!”
“All of us are tired of movin’ around, and the Littles love that trains roll by.”
“The Littles?”
“Oh!” she said, and her cheeks went rosy. “There’s two more Gilley girls now. Katie Bee—she’s six—and Bonnie Sue, who’s seven. And of course there’s Anna Mae, who’s ten. So that makes four, and I’m mighty glad for all of ’em.”
I couldn’t help bouncing on my toes. “My mother had twins! They’re boys and the same age as your Littles!” I laughed. “Maybe we’ll get them to fall in love with each other someday!”
The idea of it really tickled me, but Ginny Rose barely smiled and seemed quick to change the subject. “What about Bobby and Doris?”
I grinned. “You mean Bossy and Dodo?”
That did get a reaction out of her—we both giggled like we were kids again. Then I said, “Bobby graduated high school and is practically running the farm now. And Doris eloped with a man right after the war. He was wearing a uniform then, but he’s working the oil fields in Modesto now.” I rearranged a few jars of preserves. “She had a baby.”
“Doris is a mama?”
I nodded, then laughed. “It seems to have made her extra grouchy.”
“It’s a wonder that’s even possible,” she said with a grin. Then she waved a hand across the stand and said, “This is a smart idea.”
“Father built it when I turned twelve,” I said. But seeing it with new eyes now, I realized how weathered the raw sheet of plywood on four-by-four posts had become. “It’s not much to look at, but it does the job.”
“Well, it’s in a great spot,” Ginny Rose offered. “Folks can just pull right off the road, then get right back on it.”
“You sound like my father!” I said with a laugh.
She laughed, too, then scuffed the dirt, her mood suddenly darker. “I wanted to write, Peggy, really I did. But . . .”
“So why didn’t you? You have no idea how much I missed you!”
She was silent for a moment, then heaved a sigh. “Mama said there was more dividin’ us than bindin’ us. She said I should give up the notion of us bein’ friends.”
“What? Why?”
She kept studying the ground. “You know. ’Cause we were pickers?” She sneaked a peek at me. “Okies?”
“I never called you that!”
“But we were. We are.” She gave another little shrug. “And Papa says to take it with pride when people say it. That it means we’re survivors.”
“So then . . . why . . . ?”
“Well, other folks don’t see us as survivors. They still see us as trash.”
Even though I could tell she was papering over painful memories, her voice held no sharp edges. It was the same as it had always been—cool and smooth and fast, like ice cream dripping quicker than you can lick it.
And hearing it now sent me back to the sleepover we’d had one August—a concession I’d begged from my mother for my ninth birthday. I hadn’t understood Mother’s objections, and eventually she’d lost the will to argue with me and had relented. It had been a magical time, with just the two of us playing crazy eights and old maid and whispering late into the night.
I was about to ask Ginny Rose where their house was when a car rolled up to the fruit stand. It was a sparkling new, deep red convertible with whitewall tires. And, as if tailor-made for each other, it was Rodney St. Clair sitting behind the wheel.
My heart went for a tumble.
“Hey, Peaches,” he called, giving me a devilish grin as he stepped out.
I blushed.
So did Ginny Rose.
“You let him call you that?” she whispered.
“It’s only the second time he’s done it,” I whispered back. “And what am I supposed to do about it?”
“Her name’s Peggy,” Ginny Rose asserted.
Rodney slipped his sunglasses down his nose as he approached. “And you are . . . ?”
I pulled Ginny Rose behind the fruit stand so she was standing beside me and said, “This is my friend Ginny Rose.”
Rodney gave a little bow. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Rose.”
“My last name’s Gilley,” she said. “I’m Ginny Rose Gilley.” She tilted her head a little. “And you are . . . ?”
“This is Rodney St. Clair,” I hurried to say, hoping to get things back on track. “His family owns Valley Motors, which is how he comes to be driving a brand-new . . .” I leaned around to admire his car and let him fill in the blank.
“. . . Ford Super Deluxe.” His gaze shifted to an old bicycle propped against a tree near the road. “I could set you up,” he said with a grin in Ginny Rose’s direction. “My dad offers great financing.”
I stared at the old bicycle with its worn, oversized front basket, wondering for a moment where it had come from. But then it dawned on me—Ginny Rose hadn’t just magically appeared. She’d ridden her bike.
“Not interested in financing,” Ginny Rose said with a distinct huff.
“Well, cash is always welcome,” Rodney said.
The air was feeling strangely charged, but not in the way I would have liked. “So!” I said to Rodney. “Are you here for peaches? Preserves? Pie?”
He flashed another grin. “Maybe all three?”
My brain had gone numb wondering what he was actually after when a black Dodge sedan skidded to a stop alongside the fruit stand. “Lisette!” I called out with a wave.
She emerged from the car, her skirt waist cinched impossibly tight, her smooth dark hair in a perfect victory roll. “Peggy!” she called as she hurried toward me, her saddle shoes flying. But when she realized that the boy with his back to her was Rodney St. Clair, her skirt came in for a landing and her voice took on an aloof tone. “Hello, Rodney,” she said, turning her nose up slightly.
I’d kept my feelings about Rodney from Lisette because—not so very deep down—I knew they were foolish. I was a farm girl and he was . . . well, he was Rodney St. Clair.
I also hadn’t told her because it felt disloyal to be head over heels for a boy she hated. She’d said time and again that he was annoyingly full of himself and not to be trusted. I’d never seen her give anyone the cold shoulder the way she turned it on Rodney.
But here he was, and here she was, which left me feeling stuck between love and loyalty. So when she turned her attention to Ginny Rose, I broke out of my paralyzed state and hurried to make introductions: “Lisette, I’d like you to meet my dear friend from childhood, Ginny Rose Gilley. Ginny Rose, please meet Lisette Bovee, my dear friend since ninth grade.”
Nonnie likes to say that proper introductions put the hand that’s attending to social encounters firmly on the tiller. And since I’d heard that expression my whole life, it was almost natural for me to put the notion to use. It seemed to be working, too, because as Ginny Rose and Lisette were saying their pleased-to-meet-yous, I could feel a calm settling over all of us.
That is, until my bossy brother came clip-clopping up on our white mare, Blossom, his cowboy hat wedged on tight.
“Bobby?” Ginny Rose gasped.
I did a double take, because instead of making a crack about him still riding a high horse or some such, she was looking at him like he was Clark Gable.
Unfortunately for her, Bobby only had eyes for Lisette—a relatively new development that made Lisette uneasy, to say the least.
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