A friend of mine who writes middle-grade novels told me recently that historical fiction for kids is selling well these days. (I guess we’ve all had enough of the current reality.) Linda Joan Smith’s debut novel, THE PEACH THIEF, fits right into that. I wrote about it, glowingly, for the New York Times Book Review:
An apple got Adam and Eve thrown out of paradise. In Linda Joan Smith’s glowing debut novel, a peach shows a 13-year-old girl the way in.
It’s 1850 in Lancashire, England. The orphaned Scilla Brown is hungry and alone after the death of Dora, a lowlife who took her from the Ormskirk Workhouse to be her accomplice in petty crime. The memory of one bite of stolen peach haunts Scilla: “Oh, that bite. What dreams were made of.” She sneaks into the local earl’s garden one evening in search of more, crashing to earth when the espaliered cherry tree she has scampered up to make her getaway breaks free from the wall.
It’s no secret that I love green and growing things, so the novel’s garden theme played well with me:
Every garden is a secret garden, revealing wonders, if you know how to look. Smith, an author of garden books and the former editor of Country Home magazine, writes with a hands-in-the-dirt affinity for the rhythms and needs of growing things. “The Peach Thief” bursts with sensory details: the sun-warmed velvet of a ripe peach, rhubarb plants with “stalks red as rubies must be,” “the hum of life” in the “tiny scrap of green” of a cauliflower seedling.
May it find many readers—it deserves to.
