The Secrets of Peaches

About The Secrets of Peaches

Murphy, Leeda, and Birdie came together on a Georgia peach orchard the summer before their senior year and became something to each other that none of them expected. Now senior year is starting, the orchard is facing an uncertain future, and each of the three girls is trying to figure out who she is when the summer that defined her is over. Murphy is in love but doesn't know what to do with it. Leeda is being pulled toward a future she never chose. Birdie is beginning to understand that the orchard and the people who work it are more complicated than she was allowed to see as a child.

Published by HarperTeen in 2007, The Secrets of Peaches is the second book in Jodi Lynn Anderson's trilogy, and it deepens the world and the characters established in Peaches rather than simply extending its plot. The friendship between the three girls is now the foundation the novel builds from, and the book is as interested in testing that friendship as it is in the romantic subplots that run through it.

The migrant workers on the orchard—particularly Enrico, who Birdie fell for in the first book—are given more weight in this volume. Their lives, their families, their legal vulnerabilities, and the way the orchard depends on their labor while barely registering them as people are addressed with more directness than in the first novel. Anderson uses the sequel's space to complete a picture she only sketched in before.

What Stays and What You Have to Leave

The trilogy's central emotional question is about belonging—what it means to be from a place, to love a place, to be willing to sacrifice your future to stay in it, or to know that you cannot stay even if it's where your heart is. The Secrets of Peaches makes this question concrete for each of the three girls in ways that are distinct and honest about the fact that what is right for one person is not right for another.

Anderson's prose in this volume is slightly more assured than in the first novel, and the emotional register has deepened accordingly. The ending is bittersweet in a way that the first book's ending wasn't—which is what coming-of-age stories that take themselves seriously eventually require.

Why The Secrets of Peaches Has Been Challenged

The Secrets of Peaches has been challenged in 1 state and 1 district tracked in this catalog. Challenges largely mirror those for the first book—language, teen relationships, and content considered inappropriate for younger readers. The series depicts adolescent experience honestly, which is both why it has been challenged and why it matters to the readers who love it.