Peaches

About Peaches

Birdie is the daughter of the man who owns Darlington Peach Orchard in Bridgewater, Georgia. She is sweet and careful and has spent most of her life trying not to want things. Leeda is her cousin—wealthy, beautiful, and allergic to the way her mother has always preferred her sister. Murphy is a girl from town who ends up working on the orchard through a court-ordered community service placement. They have nothing in common and no reason to become friends. The summer turns them into something more than that.

Published by HarperTeen in 2006, Peaches is set almost entirely on the orchard and in the small Georgia town that surrounds it, and the heat, the smell of ripe peaches, and the specific culture of that place accumulate into a fully realized setting. The orchard itself is a character—its financial precariousness, the migrant workers who pick it, the way it demands everything from the family that owns it—and it changes the girls as much as they change each other.

The novel is a summer romance in the tradition of the genre, but it earns its emotional moments through specificity rather than formula. Birdie's feelings for a boy who picks fruit on the orchard are handled with a tenderness that doesn't sentimentalize the class difference between them. Leeda's awakening to what she's been performing her entire life is given space to unfold at its own pace. Murphy's chaos is revealed to have architecture.

Summer, Change, and the Friendships That Define You

Anderson writes about the way certain friendships arrive at the moment when you are most ready to be changed by them. The orchard summer arrives when all three girls are at points of fracture—Birdie's parents' marriage is quietly falling apart, Leeda is being forced toward a future she doesn't want, Murphy has burned most of the bridges in her life. What they build together on that farm is not a solution to any of those problems, but it is something that lets them face them differently.

The first novel in a trilogy, Peaches ends in a way that is complete on its own terms while leaving open the questions the girls haven't resolved yet. The Georgia summer doesn't fix anything; it just shows three people who might be capable of fixing things themselves.

Why Peaches Has Been Challenged

Peaches has been challenged in 2 states and 3 districts tracked in this catalog. Challenges most often cite language, sexual content in the teenage relationships, and some drug and alcohol use. The book depicts adolescent experience with accuracy rather than idealization—which is the same reason it resonates with the readers it was written for. Teenagers who see their actual lives reflected in fiction are more likely to read, and more equipped to think about what they're living through.