Book Review: The Peach Keeper

Author: Sarah Addison Allen
Title: The Peach Keeper
Publisher: Bantam
Publish Date: March 22, 2011
Buy: Amazon
Book Blurb: Walls of Water, North Carolina, where the secrets are thicker than the fog from the town’s famous waterfalls, and the stuff of superstition is just as real as you want it to be.

It’s the dubious distinction of thirty-year-old Willa Jackson to hail from a fine old Southern family of means that met with financial ruin generations ago. The Blue Ridge Madam—built by Willa’s great-great-grandfather during Walls of Water’s heyday, and once the town’s grandest home—has stood for years as a lonely monument to misfortune and scandal. And Willa herself has long strived to build a life beyond the brooding Jackson family shadow. No easy task in a town shaped by years of tradition and the well-marked boundaries of the haves and have-nots.

But Willa has lately learned that an old classmate—socialite do-gooder Paxton Osgood—of the very prominent Osgood family, has restored the Blue Ridge Madam to her former glory, with plans to open a top-flight inn. Maybe, at last, the troubled past can be laid to rest while something new and wonderful rises from its ashes. But what rises instead is a skeleton, found buried beneath the property’s lone peach tree, and certain to drag up dire consequences along with it.

For the bones—those of charismatic traveling salesman Tucker Devlin, who worked his dark charms on Walls of Water seventy-five years ago—are not all that lay hidden out of sight and mind. Long-kept secrets surrounding the troubling remains have also come to light, seemingly heralded by a spate of sudden strange occurrences throughout the town.

Now, thrust together in an unlikely friendship, united by a full-blooded mystery, Willa and Paxton must confront the dangerous passions and tragic betrayals that once bound their families—and uncover truths of the long-dead that have transcended time and defied the grave to touch the hearts and souls of the living.

Resonant with insight into the deep and lasting power of friendship, love, and tradition, The Peach Keeper is a portrait of the unshakable bonds that—in good times and bad, from one generation to the next—endure forever.

Review: The Peach Keeper is one of the strangest books I've read in a long time. It was a short read, less then 300 pages, and yet I never seemed to find time to read it. I'm not sure why this was, because whenever I picked it up it was engrossing.

I loved Willa and Paxton, and how as different as they both were, their lives were very much entwined, not just because of growing up together, but because of the friendship of their grandmothers.

The body that is found under a peach tree at the Blue Ridge Madam is really what pulls these two together. It gets them looking into the past and asking questions of those still around. Through all the hunting for answers, these two women find love, new friendship and new beginnings.

I loved the mystery in this story, though you couldn't quite classify this as a mystery or a romance for that matter. This book is more than that and you learn that through the friendship of Georgie and Agatha.

It was refreshing to read a story that was about friendship that didn't involve giggling girls, or talks about affairs over coffee or wine. This book felt real and cozy.

Oh and what is up with me reading all these Southern novels, lately?

Rating: 4 flowers