Ashamed of the mess she made of her life, having flunked out of college and ended up with thousands of dollars of debt, she takes the money from his insurance to open a business and settle into mundane adulthood. She returns home after her father is killed in a accident. Georgie and Agatha Osgood remain good friends and along with a few other women in town form the Women’s Society Club in 1936.Įmbarrassed by her family’s diminished social standing and economic status while growing up in the shadow of the dilapidated Madam, Willa Jackson spends most of her high school years as a social outcast and the secret joker of Walls of Water High School.

Unable to pay the taxes on the home, Willa’s grandmother Georgie becomes a maid in the home of her former social peers the Osgoods after being left broke, pregnant, and homeless.

The government buys the surrounding forest and turns it into a national park, thus ruining the family financially. It has been accurately described as lyrical for she fills the pages with images of southern traditions as well as superstition and enchantment, but her writing also evokes feelings of times gone by when family was so fundamental to our lives.īlue Ridge Madam, the antebellum mansion built by Willa’s great great-grandfather, the founder of the Jackson Logging Company, is lost to the family when her grandmother is just seventeen. While the characters do have love interests, the book encompasses considerably more. After finishing this book, I could have easily started over at the beginning and read it again.

The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen