The Peach Keeper

The Peach Keeper (2011), a novel by Sarah Addison Allen, concerns the protagonist Willa Jackson, who returns to her hometown, Walls of Water, North Carolina, recuperating from a divorce from her longtime husband. Following the wishes of her father, she resolves to move forward with a quiet, rural life. But her life is upended again with the discovery of a skeleton on their property that sparks the return of the Osgoods, a rich and powerful family that was formative to her young adulthood. When the Jackson and Osgood families discover that the skeleton holds a clue to the history of the two families’ fortunes, the families return to their old conflict. The plot incorporates elements of mysticism, thriller, and extended character development, following literary tropes about the American South and the narrative structure of gothic drama.

A storm rages in Walls of Water, disorganizing Paxton Osgood’s attempts to mail out social invitations to the town’s richest women. Scattered throughout the town, the invitations magically arrive close to their destinations. Willa Jackson, having recently returned, receives one of the invitations and hesitates about going. She talks to Rachel Edney, her barista friend, who opines that there is never any magic at work in the world; rather, magic is how men and women rationalize forces that are out of their control.

Quickly, other strange events happen, challenging Willa’s desire to reject the world’s mystery. Though she tries to avoid the gala and the Women’s Society Club where it will take place, she finds herself driving to it every day to watch it undergo renovations. One evening, she runs into Colin Osgood, Paxton’s twin brother. Alarmed that he caught her staring at the house, she struggles to connect, but a sudden gust of wind blows her invitation to the gala straight into Colin, foreshadowing the connection between their families.



Willa decides to attend a social party days before the gala despite the somewhat mistaken invite, feeling somewhat insecure as she has little money. There, the women seem to come under a spell, suddenly sharing all of their deepest secrets with each other, unable to stop. Paxton initially thinks everyone is kidding around but sees that magic is at work when she notices the panicked look in everyone’s eyes. She calls them to order, recalling her prophetic grandmother’s words about secret-keeping: “Dig one up, release them all.”

A few days later, Colin comes to Willa’s house to return the invite. He expresses his admiration for her for a series of incidents in high school where she masqueraded as the school joker, allowing Colin to take all the credit. Meanwhile, Paxton harbors a secret crush on a man named Sebastian, who she theorizes is gay because he doesn’t seem to reciprocate affection.

On the night of the gala, Paxton, the president of the Women’s Society, says that the women making up the club should focus on helping each other. She resigns from her role, vowing to help anyone that comes to her in a time of need. Agatha, the only founding member of the club still alive, expresses her pride for Paxton. She believes a ghost that has haunted their families, symbolized by the motif of a tree growing out of an ancestor’s burial site in the yard, was driven away by her bravery. In the novel’s conclusion, Willa and Paxton begin discovering new truths about their family histories. Among the discoveries is the knowledge that their respective grandmothers had a similar kind of sister-like friendship in the past. The new friendship is infectious, and the concept of sisterhood quickly spreads among the rest of the women in the town. It allows them not only to seed a new generation of women who cooperate rather than quarrel but also to strengthen their relationships with the men in the town. Paxton’s crush, Sebastian, having left the town earlier in the novel, returns, explaining that he wanted to restart his life without the pressures of other people’s expectations about him. Paxton realizes that they both want unconditional love, and they fall for each other at last.



Similarly, Colin and Willa fall in love, and Colin discards his plan to move to a different city to give their life together a chance. They spend their future moving between Walls of Water and New York. Ultimately, they return to their hometown with the news of a pregnancy, symbolizing the town’s optimism about its future.

The Peach Keeper is, at its core, a long meditation on the importance of unconditional friendship and sisterhood. It shows how women sometimes grow apart only to realize the importance of these central conditions of life and renew their old ties. The warm conclusion to Allen’s novel suggests that friendship is one of the strongest, most redeeming, and enduring aspects of life.