At 30, Willa Jackson returns to her small Southern hometown, Walls of Water, N.C., in the wake of a failed marriage to her college sweetheart. She's determined now to lead the quiet life she believes her father wants her to have, but is soon derailed by the wealthy and powerful Osgoods, the family that shaped her high school experience. The Jacksons were also wealthy once, until the logging industry failed, and Willa's teenage grandmother went to work as a maid for the Osgoods. Paxton Osgood, Willa's counterpart, has everything Willa envies—wealth, beauty and a sense of belonging—but Paxton hides a deep loneliness and discontent. To further complicate Willa's unrest, Paxton's brother, Colin, fled town years before but has returned and become an irresistible force in Willa's life. When a skeleton that holds the secret to both the Osgood and Jackson family fortunes is discovered at the Jackson family's old estate, long-held beliefs are likely to be overturned.
I chose The Peach Keeper for our first book club selection based primarily on customer reviews from the Amazon.com website.This was, of course, poor decision-making on my part. I didn't completely dislike the book, but I felt it was nothing more than southern chic-lit with a touch of magical realism thrown-in. Despite the incredible first paragraph, I didn't find it to be very compelling or memorable.
"The day Paxton Osgood took the box of heavy-stock, foil-lined envelopes to the post office, the ones she'd had a professional calligrapher address, it began to rain so hard the air turned as white as bleached cotton. By nightfall, rivers had crested at a flood stage and, for the first time since 1936, the mail couldn't be delivered. When things began to dry out, when basements were pumped free of water and branches were cleared from yards and streets, the invitations were finally delivered, but to all the wrong houses. Neighbors laughed over fences, handing the misdelivered pieces of mail to their rightful owners with comments about the crazy weather and their careless postman.....If anyone had been paying attention to the signs, they would have realized that air turns white when things are about to change, that paper cuts mean there's more to what's written on the age than meets the eye, and that birds are always out to protect you from things you don't see."
The Peach Keeper is an unlikely combination of The Breakfast Club and Fried Green Tomatoes. Paxton Osgood is your stereotypical former prom queen who is smothered by her mother's relentless expectations and her own attempts at perfection. In contrast, Willa Jackson is a former high-school prankster who runs her own business and does her best to lead a quiet, uneventful life. Friendship seems unlikely for this duo until a bizarre and supernatural chain of events draws them together in a tale of abandoned frienship, romance, loyalty, and murder.
The book had great potential, but I was disappointed in Allen's ability to develop the story, amplify the characters, and consume the reader. I was totally unconvinced with "Sebastian," the charming, handsome metrosexual love interest of Paxton, and the ludicrous explanation for his teenage homosexuality. For me, the most intriguing layer of the novel was the story of Paxton and Willa's grandmothers and their depression-era southern bell lives. Unfortunately, Georgie is virtually a non-existant character, and their tale is sloppily and abruptly explained at the end of the book. The "mystery" of their friendship isn't very mysterious, and the story was disappointingly predictable - the kiss of death, IMO!
The Peach Keeper is a quick, light, easy summer read- not a horrible book, but not one that I'll be pulling out to re-explore anytime soon.
