THE PEACH REBELLION

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.